


Gastown Nights

by Tyellas



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Blood and Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Dom/sub, Drama, Ensemble Cast, Environmentalism, Ethics, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Military Backstory, Multi, Original Character Death(s), Politics, Post-Mad Max: Fury Road, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Tension, Some Science, Suspense, The Thunderdome, Worldbuilding, glimmers of humor, references to sexual slavery and abusive relationships, welcome to industrial homoerotic Gastown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-13 08:50:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 52,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4515567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Today we're going to Gastown! After the Fury Road, the Citadel sends a team to Gastown to negotiate, backed up in the shadows by Max. In sly, filthy, tangled Gastown, nothing goes according to plan, and temptations await Furiosa, Max, and Toast. </p><p>There's action, suspense, worldbuilding, flashes of humor, politics, Wasteland sexualities, Furiosa and Max smoldering, Toast on the cusp of leadership, and one answer to the question, “Where must we go? We who wander this Wasteland, in search of our better selves?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Green Rig

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tafkar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tafkar/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sent off by the Dag, the Citadel's negotiators depart for Gastown, with Max driving alongside.

Toast perched high in the back seat of a tanker rig, at the base of the Treadmill, looking around. She’d never seen the Citadel from this vantage point before. From here, it all looked perfectly aligned: the three Towers, the Skullmouth high above them, the driveway through with its crossroads at the end, going north, east, or south. Citadel inhabitants peered down from the heights. The former Wretched were taking a break from building mud brick abodes. Every day after her Sisters and Furiosa had taken control, the place was working better, making more sense while being kinder.

Which was why they were about to drive away from it.

“Today we’re going to Gastown!”

When the War Boys began their call and response, Toast and Cheedo peered out of the left side of the truck’s cabin. “Can you get the Ace back in here?” Toast said. Cheedo leaned out and called to the Ace, at the front of what had once been the Citadel’s backup tanker rig. The War Boys there were adjusting a skull that hung in the center of the truck’s grill, and adding more wire to the wreath of sturdy green leaves that surrounded it. A drooping white banner was blocking the view out of Toast’s window. She opened the cabin door on the right.

“Today we’re hauling Aqua-Cola!”

Toast looked down. Out there, getting his green and white robes dusty, the tattooed old History Man was surrounded by Wretched. You’d think he’d been away from them for oldyears, instead of just a hundred and sixty-five days. He had been brought up out of the mob into the Citadel the same day she and Cheedo had returned from the Fury Road. Toast called, “We need to get going!” He was spry enough to clamber into the cabin beside Toast.

“Today we’re doing…” The chant dissolved into confusion.

“ _Today we’re doing diplomacy_ doesn’t have that War Boy ring to it,” the History Man chuckled, closing his door.

The Ace, reluctantly seated, whipped off a black leather vest and folded it across his lap. “Bloody warm for a War Boy.” He bawled out his window, “Today we’re showing Gastown who’s boss!” The War Boys yelled this happily.

The front door of the truck opened, and Furiosa swung into the driver’s seat. She set the steering wheel slot against its bolt, then slid in a linchpin to hold it. There was an extra moment while she swiped her own leather vest into place (hers reached to the ground), and knotted down the voluminous red scarf around her neck. Toast had been the one to persuade Furiosa to go along with the clothes and the banners and garlands, fresh symbols for the Citadel. She had resisted until Toast said, “The Immortan would never have chosen these ...you'll drive, right? That's part of the message, having you at the wheel.” That worked.

“Signaling up now.” Furiosa placed a mirror fragment blunted with tar in her mechanized left hand, and tilted this out her window. A responding flash of light shone from the Skullmouth above, the Citadel’s leader’s perch.

“I can’t wait to hear the Dag up there!” Cheedo said.

“Yeah, instead of Joe’s blather,” said Toast, cupping a hand in front of her mouth. “I am your redeemer. Watch me abuse this well system for two minutes.”

The loudspeaker crackled, echoing through the Citadel’s courtyard. A young, sibilant voice rang down. “Clear the roadway. Clear the roadway now, thank you. I am the Dag, of the Sisters, speaking for the New Citadel Council. Today we send a Rig to Gastown for trade and talk. I salute Imperator Furiosa and my Sisters Toast the Knowing and Cheedo. Our War Boys, led by the Ace, guard and protect them.” Outside the Rig, on three bikes and clinging to the Rig itself, Toast glimpsed the War Boys proudly giving a V8 salute.

“For the first time in Citadel history, we send one of the former Wretched…” The crowd at the base started screaming when she said _Wretched._ Toast had to strain her ears to hear the Dag continue. “…the History Man. Bring us back a great trade agreement so we don’t have to give those smegheads as much of our food and water. Here, today, water for ground dwellers at the usual time around sundown. See your camp leaders about available food. Together we are redeeming the Citadel! This is The Dag of the Sisters signing out.”

“She sounded so good!” said Cheedo. “I hope I do that well.”

“Did she really say _smeghead_ on the loudspeaker?” Toast wondered, half-laughing.

The Rig had been purring through all of this, and when Furiosa accelerated, it sputtered forwards. The white banners lifted as they drove through the crowd, out of the courtyard, and onto the open road, turning south at the crossroads.

Anti-climactically, once the Citadel was halfway to the horizon, Furiosa pulled over and stopped. The War Boys scrambled around the Rig. They stowed the white banners and green garlands, so that they weren’t blown away or dried out by the road. It was a decent quarter-day run to Gastown.

Furiosa turned around to address them. “We’ll be a few minutes. Ace, you weren’t at the Council meetings leading up to this. Let’s do a final debrief. We’ve got four goals, going out to Gastown. Renegotiate our trade – send less food because we need less guzz now.”

“Shut down the Mother’s Milk trade, too,” said Toast. "The Mothers want to cut back and keep that here."

“Yes. This should be the last time we bring any. We’re also showing strength. Reminding Gastown they need us more than we need them. ”

“That true, Boss?” asked the Ace.

“Not sure. We need less guzz – what we do need, we need hard. We’re sending food, but our Green Thumbs are restless with Joe dead. We need a Gastown alliance that we can guarantee locked down.”

“We’re all very lucky that the Dag does a splendid job playing garden goddess – and that she sees it as _playing_ ,” the History Man observed. “Trade and strength for two goals, Imperator. The others?”

“We’re also showing the Wasteland we’re strong. They’re watching what we do at the Gastown Amnesty.”

Toast said, “Over the past thousand days, Joe’s son Scabrous, who was the Gastown warlord, got killed. There was the Citadel’s road war with those cultists. Then our Fury Road killed off three sets of leaders who’d been in power forever. I bet the Wasteland is wondering if _we’re_ next.”

The History Man added, “To say nothing of our emerging internal difficulties. Wordburger: hydrological infrastructure sustainability.”

Furiosa said, “That’s our final goal. Get Gastown to support Citadel passage through their area, maybe drill a water well or two. We want their support of a road south for us in case the Citadel’s well runs down.” The enormity of this quieted everyone. She continued. “We’ll have two nights and two days to negotiate. The second day is the start of the Amnesty. We stay for that day and sponsor Gastown’s cage fight. With the prize you proposed, Ace.”

“Wouldn’t have said a thing if I’d known I’d be trapped in the Rig cage with you lot,” Ace groused.

Furiosa smiled at him. “You’re my crew second, you know the Citadel inside out, and you know Gastown best of any of us. So you’re stuck in here. We need your input on what they put to us for an alliance. And I want you to watch our Sisters.”

“Gotcha, Boss. I’ll scope Gastown today – not who they were.”

“Cheedo – you’re our voice for public events. You show them that the Citadel has changed, by being with us and speaking. We want them to see how different we are now.”

Cheedo said, “I promise!”

Furiosa narrowed her eyes at the History Man. “You have the History and the wordburgers. You’re an elder from the Before-time, and you know the guzz and water underground.” She pointed at him. “Keep that last one quiet. The less Gastown knows we’ve got that, the better.”

He said, cheerfully, “ _Legum servi sumus, Imperator!_ If they ask, I’m your amanuensis – here to remember what happens.” Toast caught Furiosa’s exasperated breath and understood. When the History Woman had been alive and used Before-time talk like that, Toast had felt smart for just barely understanding. When the History Man did it, for some reason, she felt the stupid part of herself, more.

Furiosa continued. “Everyone, keep quiet that Max is trailing us. He’s got the back of our back. He’s driving in ahead, making his own entrance. He’ll bring us news of what Gastown is saying when we aren’t around and warn us if there’s trouble brewing.”

“They’ll be bunking us in the Establishment tower, right in the middle. I told Max the Citadel’s floor there, and how to skinny up the pipes and ladders ‘round back,” the Ace said.

“Good, thanks. What are we keeping quiet?”

Toast said, “That Max is helping us and that the History Man used to be a geologist.”

Furiosa nodded. “You and Cheedo are also both Citadel Council reps, and here to learn. You may be doing this in the future.”

“Yes, Furiosa.” Toast felt that this, her only reason for being there, was the weakest. She wished she was sitting up front with Furiosa to get more depth on it. Instead she was crammed into the back, not even rating a War Boy for protection. The History Man beside her had a rifle concealed in the drapes and folds of his green and white robes. If he shot anything like the History Woman had, Toast expected that, if it came to defense, they’d switch places.

Toast had spent a hundred days at the firing range becoming a passable shot, and the practice pistol was on her hip. She was even dressed something like the Ace and Furiosa. She shifted around, wrapping her black and red scarf high and tight, like Furiosa’s. Toast’s own leather vest came down to her hips, over her long-sleeved shirt, black trousers, and the first decent boots of her life. It felt good to be covered.

“I wish the Dag was with us,” Cheedo sighed.

Furiosa said, “If all of us are killed, the ones who aren’t with us can keep the Citadel going.” Cheedo’s mouth opened, and then closed, silently. The two old men both grunted in unsurprised agreement.

“If worst comes to worst, you Sisters stick to Max. He’ll get you home.” Furiosa was talking to everyone while her eyes bored into Toast. Toast silently made the Vuvalini’s recollection gesture. Furiosa’s blackened brow unknotted. She turned around, satisfied. A War Boy banged on Furiosa’s door. “We’re ready. He’s here.”

Outside, they heard an engine revving. Toast peered over to see a dark, low brushed-metal car, with weird spikes and excresences, pulled up beside them. The scruffy, sunburned driver had downturned eyes, and both he and his car were dirty already. Cheedo waved madly at Max, and Toast smiled and raised her hand, too.

Furiosa rolled her window open (the rig, like the one it replaced, had a left-side drive). Max looked up, car idling, while Furiosa began the process of restarting the Rig. As the engine warmed back up, each of them slid an arm out their windows, hers metal, his with a scarred hand, as if they were about to exchange signals. As much as they were staring at each other, they didn’t, not that Toast could identify. Finally, Furiosa pulled the Rig’s horn, once, and Max zoomed out ahead. The rig, stripped of its green, rumbled forwards.

Toast peered up front. Furiosa met Toast’s eyes again in the cracked, recycled rear view mirror. “It’s going to be a hard few days. I’m going to drive for a while.” Between the Imperator’s black and the vivid crimson scarf, with her head shorn hard, Furiosa looked tired and stern. Toast hadn’t seen her look that way since…the Fury Road. None of them had gone beyond the Citadel’s territory since they had returned.

Feeling the hairs on the back of her neck rise, Toast decided against asking to ride up front.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Wordburgers:_  
>  _What is a Wordburger?_ Either a starting point for a story – a phrase, a name, something worth remembering - or a quote from pre-apocalyptic literature or media that is meaningless without historical context.  
>  _Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus_ \- Latin: We are slaves of the law in order that we may have the ability to be free.  
>  _Hydrological infrastructure sustainability_ – See the prequel story [A Handful of Dust](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4456166) for Wasteland in which the Citadel’s well is not as infinite as everyone hoped.


	2. Over the Plains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ace and Cheedo agree about the Citadel, Toast is troubled by History, Furiosa and Max drive together, and Gastown overwhelms immediately.

The road to Gastown was not in good shape. More than once, Furiosa accelerated through sand drifts, and they all had to grit their teeth when the raised roadbed dipped into slumps.

After some rocky hills appeared, the Ace spoke up. “There’s the Three Signs. We’re out of Citadel territory, now. This is Wasteland road.” One of the old signs clinging to metal spars was nothing but a faded blur of blue and green. The second, its lower half shot away, still promised _Lifestyle and Investment Properties Now!_ The third, blood-red letters on a stained white background, mystified with _Karratha Westfield – Premium Retail – Opening 2020_.

“ _Wordburger: I still call Australia home_ ,” sighed the History Man. “Forty-five oldyears after the end of the world.”

“That’s done and dusted. Been the Wasteland since I was just old enough to make War Boy,” the Ace replied.

Toast finished rearranging her scarf for a second time as Cheedo went through a whispered practice of her speeches. Like all of them, Cheedo was dressed to be seen by the Gastown crowds. She was sheltered by a long, high-necked gown of pale green billows and draperies that left only her arms bare, but she could shift a scarf draped around her shoulders, if she wanted. Her face was highlighted with black soot and gold dust, and a few brass ornaments clipped her hair. She shifted her billows, and asked the Ace, kindly, “Do you have enough room?”

“S’alright. Don’t mind the rifle. There’d be more room up front for it,” he said, louder than necessary. Furiosa stayed impassive. Toast just barely overrheard him grumble to Cheedo, “Hear those Wretched scream on the way out? Makes me glad I’m a Citadel man.”

Cheedo smiled up at him. “It’s better that they like us now. I was born at the Citadel. I’m glad we came back.”

The Ace looked pleased. “Was about your age when I joined up with the Immortan. Just Joe Moore then. Him an’ his troops were the best thing I’d seen after the big bombs. Came up the coast with him, waited outside while he took the Citadel. He seemed like a god.”

“He wasn’t,” said Cheedo, quietly.

The Ace quirked his mouth. “Our Furiosa showed Joe Moore that, all right. War Boy word now is that men come and go, but the V8 is eternal. We better do right at Gastown to keep the engines running, and the War Boys still alive motivated, if you understand.”

“The War Boys with us are all really excited. What’s Gastown like?” Cheedo asked.

“Aw, it’s real shine for the Boys. Good place for a good time. All the action happens at night in Gastown. You can swap at the night markets for stuff you’d never see anywhere else. Don’t eat the barbecue there, whatever you do. They cook up people.” When Cheedo gasped, the Ace grinned crooked, showing a steel tooth. “Don’t let ‘em buy you drinks, neither, or you’ll wake up leg-shackled inside the refinery, maybe, or out in the desert with some cult. Stay sharp and it’s all right. You can hear stories and Tells from ferals and scavs, go see the fights, start a few fights yourself if you saw some Buzzards or a Gastown Boy looked at you wrong.” He frowned. “Any boy looks at _you_ wrong, you’re from the Citadel and you’ve got eleven War Boys at your back.”

Cheedo beamed, “And Furiosa!”

Toast was half-listening to this. She was thinking about who she’d rather travel with, besides these two bald old men. She pulled up her left sleeve and ran her finger across the names the Dag had helped her ink across her lower arm. MA. LOLLY. DELTA ACRUX. ANGHARAD. MISS GIDDY. VUVALINI. Angharad would have had Gastown at her feet within minutes, she was sure. She glanced up and caught the History Man watching her.

Toast yanked her sleeve down, feeling her face go hot. Like all the History People, he knew too much. He had come out of the Vault one day with a slender book filled with Miss Giddy’s handwriting – and terrible truths about her life as one of the Immortan’s wives. He had handed the book over and, later, been the one to teach the Sisters the word _confidentiality_. Toast still felt sore and wary. She scrambled to say something before he asked her about her left arm, or that time. “How is it that you have wordburgers, like Miss Giddy, but you also know about geology?”

“I was teaching geology at a university. I needed to know more. We used to be interdisciplinary – finding out how different areas of knowing intertwined. After the end of the world, I learned as I went. Every time I met someone with, as you say today, some smarts. Like you.” He gave her a shrewd look. “I know you’re highly placed at this new Citadel. What is it that you do, exactly?”

At least this wasn’t about her arm. “Miss Giddy told us about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I think the Sisters I came back with are like the anti-Horsemen, trying to heal the world afterwards. Cheedo’s the Anti-Plague, working with the old Vuvalini in the Infirmary, making people want to get better. Capable’s the Anti-War, helping the War Boys find some peace. Dag is the Anti-Famine, keeping the gardens running and growing new plants and trying to feed everyone. Furiosa is the Anti-Death, she nearly died and lives again, and now she protects us.” Toast paused. “They’re all really clear. I help them all out, I guess. They have the ideas and someone has to make them happen.”

“It takes smarts to tie it all together. To be interdisciplinary,” he said. “ _Wordburger: History is an angel, being swept into the future._ Miss Giddy said in her journal you were her smartest student. Have you ever thought of taking up the History?”

Toast swallowed in shock. “But - Capable’s the one who’s trying to do Tells.”

“Which is marvellous. An emerging artist! It’s been so long. And now, there’s you. How do you see yourself?”

Toast stiffened. “I loved the History Woman. But she was weak. She couldn’t stop the Citadel from taking her. We couldn’t change it inside the Vault, even when we tried. You read Miss Giddy’s journal. I know you know how we tried.” She felt her face tighten with anger. It had to be anger, making her flush and tremble like this. “Miss Giddy never fought, she hardly raised her voice, she couldn’t even fire a gun to kill a man she hated. I have to be – I _am_ different.” She added, “I killed a man on the Fury Road, you know. With one shot.” She looked over to see how he’d take that.

His face was furrowed. “You killed a man with one shot, and you’re proud…”

“I want to keep us safe, too,” Toast said, glancing up front at Furiosa. “Before the History People came to the Citadel, you looked after Miss Giddy, right?”

The History Man was quiet before saying, “That’s a complicated answer. You’ll understand if I haven’t the heart, right now.” He folded himself in and cast his gaze out the window.

This left Toast to stare straight ahead while Cheedo nattered to the Ace about growing up in the War Tower gardens, growing cotton. The road out front looked unchanging. Straight and flat and ochre, with a War Boy bike in front, and, ahead, the dark moving dot of another vehicle. Toast leaned back and sighed, wishing they were there, already.

* * *

Furiosa wished this drive could go on forever. With four of the best talkers at the Citadel in the back seat, they were taking care of themselves, instead of trying to win her attention. The Ace was grumbling, and getting his due at last, too. About time. Cheedo was sparing her from the public talking that drained her. Toast was as good as a second History Person and twice as practical. She trusted all three with her life. The War Boys were perfectly balanced on this Rig and on their bikes, making them all a tight, beautiful moving unit. Straight ahead, staying just in sight however she varied her driving, was Max’s car.

She had listened to the Ace describe Gastown with a hard heart. He hadn’t mentioned how the place stank – when you went there often, you got used to it. The smell had been an appropriate atmosphere for its past rulers. With Scabrous Scrotus as warlord, and the People Eater at his side counting the cost, the Citadel felt wholesome in comparison. She would never have brought the Sisters to old Gastown. It wasn’t difficult for any new regime there to be saner than Scabrous.

Max had said the new leaders were two gray old administrators, the last leading Gastown War Boy left after intercene fighting, and one of the People Eater’s former cronies. (A lesser People Eater? Probably manageably corrupt, easily intimidated.) They sounded more likely than the current Citadel Council: than her own unimagined redemption.

Furiosa was still counting her own costs against that. None of them in the back seat knew how far down and dark she'd had to go to survive seven thousand Citadel days.  Not even the Ace: she'd only lucked into working with him after surviving as a field Imperator. She never talked much about what she'd done during that time. She didn't need to, to remember. Occasionally, she heard that the Wasteland hadn't forgotten, either.

Yet here she was, driving off to Gastown to see about peace and a future. For the Sisters, the Vuvalini, the Citadel people, even the History Man. He was as maddening, obscure, and endlessly talkative as the History Woman had been. But he told her the truth that he saw in the Citadel’s workings, where Corpus flinched and evaded, clinging to the remnants of power. Besides, Max had brought him in.

Here, the road looked like it was having a smooth stretch. She gave the horn two quick, brief pulls and accelerated. The car in the distance, Max’s car, slowed. Soon, he was driving at her side. She took the Rig as fast as it could go, and Max kept pace. She saw him lift a hand and stabilized her speed. In a quick, crazy bit of driving, his car revved out front, right between her and the point bike, reversed to the left side, kept pace with her there for a moment, then finished reversing to circuit around the Rig. He wound up back where he started, at her left, and answered her blazing look with his closed half-smile.

With his eyes locked to hers, she turned to see the road, knowing he would, too. The rocky hills had risen to a plateau, and the road narrowed to a canyon. She gestured with her left arm. Max immediately screamed out ahead of the Rig and the point bike to the lead. She warmed with satisfaction.

Since the Fury Road, Max had come and gone from the Citadel, showing up saner each time. She’d noticed his glances starting to slow down as they crossed her. Three hundred days earlier, if she’d clocked that from a War Boy, she’d have crushed him like a mealtime bug. But Max was a different animal from the Citadel toughs. Brown and ruddy like the landscape, more raw and pure in his violence, sourced from his will to live. And no living War Boy had done what Max had for her, or offered himself so subtly, with one foot out the door.

Furiosa had boxed him in to keep him where he was and asked him everything she could think of, to see if he was serious. Then, she told him what he could expect if he stayed the night, how hard her one hand could be, and waited for him to leave. He’d stayed. She’d explored him and made the most of his stunning resilience. He’d only snapped once, and it was catharsis to pin him down and forbid him to lose himself, to tell him what he was worth. Then she’d tried to show him an alternative. He’d stayed the rest of the night – they’d even managed a little sleep.

The next day, she’d rolled through the worst, most extended Council meeting imaginable as calmly as a windmill.

Since then, they had stolen a few midnights to blunt their edges together. There was a forgiveness in what he allowed her. A better version of herself in his eyes that, for once, she slightly believed. They didn’t have to tell each other the horrors they’d known: their survival was evidence. When the doors weren’t locked, they still got along. It was easy to join him at dawn at the firing range and use up too much ammunition. He reminded her of the quiet, durable men who had come and gone amongst the Vuvalini when she was a girl, even cursing the same Before-time way they used to. His quiet let her emerge from her defending silence. Or say nothing at all, while not being alone.

She was glad Max talked her into slipping further away one early morning so that he could hand over the wheel of his car. “I need you to try it,” he’d said.

Behind the wheel, she’d understood. The acceleration! They took it west towards the Powder Lakes. It was an intoxicating thing to drive, light speed and power, a knife for the road compared to a full truck. He’d glowed with pride and given in to his rare, irresistible smile. She’d brought them to a screaming stop in a spray of ruddy salt ground, while she still had some control. “Get in the back,” she’d urged, and thrown herself against his body. And –

The sound of the Ace and Cheedo laughing together in the back had her blocking out the rest.

They were through the canyon. It was time. She dragged the horn, long and hard. Max fired himself off like a bullet, leaving them driving his dust. Arching her spine, she breathed to cool herself.

Neither of them expected anything more during their Gastown overlap. Beyond that, Max was heading out to scout pathways south. There were no guarantees of reunion for Wasteland travelers. The most she was hoping for was that, with her life beyond her imagining, those hours with Max hadn’t been wrong.

Even if Max was the one to claim that hope was a mistake.

* * *

Toast jolted back awake at the blast of the horn, and the feel of Cheedo starting forward and waving out the front. Cheedo said, “Max just went on ahead.”

“That feral drives, all right,” said the Ace, with grudging approval.

“ _Wordburger: Oh, had I the flight of the bronzewing, then over the plains I would fly, straight to the land of my childhood…_ ” History’s voice tapered off.

“Is there more?” asked Cheedo.

There was a pause before he continued. “ _And there I would lay down and die. Wrap me up with my stockwhip and blanket, bury me deep down below…_ ” His sonorous voice carried them over rising foothills, sheltering them from more conversation. Toast listened. The poetry reminded her more of Miss Giddy than anything else he had said. She was torn between sad relief that she’d let Miss Giddy’s tribesman know what was what, and thinking that if he said _wordburger_ once more, she’d sock him one. When his poem ended, he fell silent again.

Soon after this, their convoy came to a rise. Furiosa pulled the horn again, and they ground to a stop at its peak. The War Boys scrambled to dress the Rig again in white and green. Furiosa said, “There’s Gastown.”

Toast stared out into the dusk, horrified. The metal amalgamation dominating the plain below was almost as tall as a Citadel tower, but it was made entirely by man. It looked like a revhead’s fever dream of an engine to take over the world, strange tubes and smokestacks and blocks, upended onto the landscape. And its heights were on fire. Black smoke belched up, reddening the sunset, pierced by irregular red and blue flames. At the base was clustered a treasure of metal salvage. Around it all, a wide, iridescent moat reflected the red and lavender sky with a polluted shimmer. The shantytowns at the base of the great works were a grey afterthought, clinging to the oily shore like scum. A rickety bridge led over the moat.

Toast could just see vehicles and tiny human figures lined up to enter the dark mouth of the bridge’s gate. The wind changed, sending smoke and sulphur fumes in their direction. Now she understood why her scarf was so long and thick. She unwound it and buried her face in it, gasping.

“Civilization!” The History Man said. _“Wordburger: rolling drunk on petroleum._ ”

“Beautiful, innit?” said the Ace. He bowed his head over a V-8 sign.

Cheedo looked at the tangled, flaming chaos and her hand met Toast’s. They knotted fingers, hard. In Toast’s ear, Cheedo whispered, “The old Vuvalini, they all said I shouldn’t come, that it was terrible here. That only Furiosa was strong enough. I didn’t believe them. I really want to help, but it’s - it’s not going to be like at the Citadel, with the Council.”

Toast wrapped an arm around Cheedo’s shoulders. “They’re going to fall over backwards for you.” Cheedo had made the Ace smile and unbend, when he was still refusing to come to Council meetings. Whereas she, Toast, had made even the voluble History Man stop talking. A clumsy talker, a novice shot who’d got lucky once, in the dust compared to Furiosa when Cheedo needed her to be strong – what was she worth, away from the Citadel? She firmed her grip on Cheedo. “Remember what Angharad said. That we’re strong together.” Cheedo nodded, and clenched Toast’s waist for an instant.

Furiosa had wrapped her own mouth and nose in swathes of crimson scarf. She levered up to stand on her seat, a longview in her hand. Rolling back the cab’s roof, she alternated between watching the War Boys and eyeing the bridge into Gastown. When they were done, she shouted, “Good. I see them waiting for us. We’re going down.”

Her word went down the line. “Taking her down!”

“Going down!”

“Down!”

The Rig roared for the descent to Gastown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Wordburgers:_  
>  _I still call Australia home_ –1980s pop song by Peter Allen.  
>  _History is an angel_ \- [Variably adapted parable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus) based on a Klee painting/Walter Benjamin description.  
>  _Oh, had I the flight of the bronzewing_ – Australian postcolonial traditional poem, [The Dying Stockman.](http://folkstream.com/034.html>The%20Dying%20Stockman.</a>)  
>  _rolling drunk on petroleum_ Kurt Vonnegut quote. " Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."


	3. Gastown Mates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max arrives in Gastown, blends into the crowd less than he hoped, and watches some Gastown mates and the Citadel’s arrival.

Impatiently, Max tapped his fingers on his steering wheel, stuck in the line for admission into Gastown. The sun was going down. As the air cooled, the Wasteland rabble were emerging to try their luck getting in before the Amnesty.

A bike with a sidecar was working the line. The driver was a typical Gastown brute; the sidecar man was stubby, somewhat warped. He brandished a megaphone. Periodically, the bike stopped and the sidecar man bellowed, in an unctuous bass voice, “Welcome to Gastown! Industrial wonder of the world! Our entry way is covered by flame throwers at all times! The Amnesty begins at midnight tomorrow. Forty-eight hours of free entry, trade, and the spectacular Thunderdome. When the Gastown sirens go, the Amnesty begins. Until then, no Buzzards, no Scavs admitted. No Buzzards, no Scavs until the Amnesty. There is a cholera warning. Bring cholera into Gastown, you will be torched. State your business at the gate. Until the Amnesty, you can be denied admission for any reason. We have flamethrowers! Thank you for visiting Gastown!”

The megaphone blare did send some people peeling out of the line to wait for the Amnesty. Max pulled his car up a few yards. Giving in to the stink of Gastown, he wrapped his black scarf around his face. The place never had the same smell twice. There was a note of rotting flesh in the sulphur, today.

He leaned back in his seat. Apart from the smell, Gastown seemed just as it had been right before his life really went to shit. In one night, he’d used up two oldyears worth of luck surviving the Gastown Thunderdome for the sake of an engine. His life after that had been an insane nightmare, even by Wasteland standards. Getting staked in the desert, rescuing a kidnapped girl, failing to save her life, spiraling down as she turned out to be one loss too many, running and hiding and starving and running, getting used as a Citadel blood bag, the Fury Road.

Things had started to improve since he’d heard Furiosa ask him, “You want that thing off your face?” He wondered how much bad luck he’d bled out as a blood bag. He’d just been working out a new Wasteland circuit. Citadel stops meant he had regular tucker and enough water, and that helped him keep his head together, more. He’d been less withdrawn on the road, and it had helped him seal a vital deal. After that, when he’d turned the key on a car of his own at last, he’d felt alive once more. A man.

Finally, he was over the bridge for a friendly Gastown welcome. A masked enforcer barked, “Flamethrowers on. Leave your vehicle or be torched.”

He pulled himself out of his car slowly, with his hands up. A second enforcer said, “Clear your face and state your business.”

Max pulled down the scarf. “Barter.”

The enforcer was joined by a very different figure. Max eyed an old man about the same height as him, with gimlet blue eyes and half his face scarred, a thick gray stripe of hair down the center of his skull. A long robe, also gray, swirled around his ankles. He looked familiar. “Well, well. I believe I remember you. Didn’t you take the Thunderdome two Amnesties ago? The envy of all, hauling off a V8 engine in a vintage golf cart. I see where you put it.” He caressed the hood of Max’s car. He was wrong, but Max didn’t correct him. The Gastown enforcers tilted their flamethrowers down.

Max lowered his hands. His interrogator smiled. “Comes the hour, comes the man. I am the Arbiter, the voice of Gastown law and our Thunderdome, and I welcome you back to our fair refinery. Are you planning to stay through the Amnesty?”

“Mph.”

The Arbiter walked quietly around Max and his vehicle. Max felt those hard eyes raking in every detail of his face, his knee brace, his gear, totaling him up with a barter value. “Glad to see you’ve been doing well. From scav to road warrior! Of course you’ll be overnighting in your fine conveyance. The best guarded lot is your second left. Tell them the Arbiter said to look after you.”

“Mm-hm.”

Max hated being pinned down, but the old guy was right about the parking lot. Anywhere else, he’d get his throat slit for his rations alone. He got back in his car and went to sort that out, fast. The premium lot was already three-quarters full, and the gates were starting to get crowded with watchers, inside and out. He gave it half an hour before the Citadel team arrived, maybe less.

He joined the crowd outside his parking area. Many of the other watchers wore masks with filters – either to try and keep out the malodorous air, or because they’d been burned in the course of their Gastown work. The pipe works were just beginning, here. More watchers were twined up in the pipes, shinnying along with ease or perching lightly, ready to move if the works got hot under them. Vendors were selling fried crickets and bottled Gastown groundwater. “Aqua-Pepsi, charcoal filtered three times! Take the challenge!”

Pairs of prostitutes, female, male, and bothways, were strutting up and down, their mismatched shoes or boots signalling their availability. The crowd was largely indifferent to them. They probably expected business to warm up after the crowd got a sight of the unattainable Citadel women. You could get a lot of things in Gastown, but a willing beauty who wasn’t charging you to touch was the rarest.

Two wiry men next to him in the crowd were leaning comfortably together, eating from the same bag of crispy crickets. One had a hand in the other’s left back pocket and his valuables on the right side. The one holding the cricket bag had his valuables on the left and a colored bandana on his belt. The way they stood, they protected each other. Gastown mates: two blokes paired up day and night, from their livelihood to their bunk. They were the most respectable thing about Gastown.

Max knew he’d be saner if mateship like that had worked for him. Trying a time or two had shown him he was a woman’s man: now more than ever, after a taste of Furiosa.

On his fourth circuit to the Citadel, she’d come alone to greet him out of the desert dust. An hour with her at the edge of the Wasteland, seeing her more perfect and strong than ever, witnessing how she had come into her own since the Fury Road, had done him in. That night, he’d screwed up his courage and let her know she could have him. If Furiosa had laughed him out, he had a fast car and an errand from her, to take him further than he’d ever gone before. His survivor’s intuition had done him the favor of picking a decent moment.

Furiosa had stalked him into a corner and grilled him about every past shame a man in the Wasteland could have. Then she told him what the Citadel had made of her, and what she needed, and he hadn’t said no. The harshness of her had let him feel, for once. When he’d panicked, she put up with none of it: pinned him down and told him he was going to remember his name and come back to himself and to her, no escape. He’d gone down for that, and considered himself rewarded.

The next day he’d slept in a Citadel room until midday, dreamlessly.

Now, he and Furiosa were in a nameless place, between the ease of Gastown mates and his worshipful shock that a warrior woman who wore two matching boots would take them off for him. (Sometimes. She usually kept half her clothes on, one way or another – like he preferred to, with his back so messed up.) Furiosa was strong enough to survive, and he was too fractured to let anyone close who wasn’t, and she had _ideas_ , and going along with them kept his ghosts in abeyance. Back in his lost youth, when his world was a lot more together, he’d had a goofball friend who’d mocked him for how he was with a girl. _You’re a fool for her! You’re whipped, bro!_ He was, again, and glad about it.

Max had stayed warily in her rooms a few nights, entering late, leaving early. Improving his eye at the firing range had been a fine excuse to watch her shooting. But he’d felt the most relaxed when they’d left the Citadel entirely one dawn so that he could hand over the wheel of his car to her.

He’d told himself that he was showing her that he was going to be all right in the Wasteland. The acceleration had to be felt to be believed. They took it west, towards the Powder Lakes. Watching her light up behind the wheel, seeing her wresting the powerful drive from left to right, raising half the dry lakes as her dust, had been intoxicating. She’d brought them to a screaming stop in a spray of blood-colored salt ground, showing the metal beast who was in control. “Get in the back,” she’d ordered, and pinned him hard against the seat. And –

He forced himself to stop recalling before the working pairs passing by picked up on his energy. They had a way of doing that. Usually, they avoided his eyes and went in the other direction, fast.

Finally. The latest Rig was grinding its way over the bridge. As it entered the Gastown gates, the War Boys leapt down into formation. Max set his teeth at the sight of them. The Rig drew murmurs from the crowd when they saw the bone-white and the true leaf green.

Furiosa descended from the Rig, leather swirling around her ankles, and her negotiating foursome came up behind her. They looked good together. Away from the Citadel, the girls seemed so young. The Arbiter came up – made sense that he was there to meet them, no other reason for one of the Gastown rulers to be on the gate. Cheedo stepped forwards, sprinkled a handful of sage-green leaves on the ground, and said something. Max saw the Arbiter talking to them, though he couldn’t make out the words.

The Arbiter bowed elaborately to the Sisters and kissed Cheedo’s hand – there, right on cue, was a pissed-off look from Toast. (A hand on her own pistol, too, he was pleased to see.) The History Man also seemed to have the Arbiter’s approval. Furiosa was cool and rigid, a large-bore rifle slung under her right arm. The red scarf suited her, but it made her such a target. Max’s hand was sweating as he gripped his own pocketed pistol, darting his eyes around the crowd.

The pleasantries done, they began to progress into Gastown, two of the Boys peeling away to look after the Rig. The crowd parted for them, nudged by the enforcers with flamethrowers. Max stepped a little back. He’d been worried about the crowd shouting at them, especially at the girls, but the enforcers seemed to have them in line. He wondered what else about the changes in Gastown was keeping the crowd down.

Suddenly, he and Furiosa were across from each other. Imperator and road warrior, divided by the War Boys and the Gastown mob. When she saw him, Furiosa met his eyes and lifted her chin. Max kept her gaze and lowered his head, slightly.

Then, she passed by. The instant was gone. He was left with a disturbed heat and his solitude in the crowd.

After the last enforcer stomped along, the Gastown watchers dissolved back into a mob. Their reactions swirled around him.

“Did you see, pup? Did you see the pretty lady?”

“I GOT A LEAF!”

“Show me!”

“What d’you want for it?”

“The Immortan used to come in with twenty.”

“How much for an hour with both of you?”

“The new warlord. She’ll last a few years, eh?”

“What’s your wager?”

A twisted thought burned through him: that this was too good to last, it should all come to an end right now. He should run, before he fucked up again, and never return. Drive badly enough to bring him blood and fire, then darkness. The urge seized his limbs and warped his mind, turning him into bad wiretech. Fuck. Not now. He’d been doing all right, for once. He had things to do. For her. For them. Max gave himself a shake, head tight with static.

Max heard the Gastown mates in front of him chime in. “Warlord woman. We may be in trouble, if she’s good.”

“Or if she’s not.”

He clenched the gun in his right pocket, hard enough to leave its red imprint on his palm. Then, he forced his way through the crowd to follow Furiosa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both comics and movie canon here - one of the Max Max comics takes us to Gastown in some detail.


	4. Blood, Fire, and Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Citadel team enters Gastown. Furiosa is challenged to a duel and tangled in Gastown legalities.

Furiosa had only one order for them as she stopped the Rig on the other side of the Gastown bridge. “Faces uncovered, everyone.” Toast reluctantly pulled down her scarf.

They pulled up in a flat, graveled space between the bridge opening and the start of the pipes. Another seriously old man was waiting for them, gray from head to toe. Toast barely registered him, or his flamethrower-toting guards, for the murmuring wall of Gastown watchers on each side. There had been as many watchers at the Citadel, but they had been friendly, open faces, united by the desert dust. This mob was hidden behind a hundred bizarre masks, or provocatively half-naked, or, threateningly, both. She couldn’t see Max anywhere. A few Gastown War Boys were visible, wearing vests and hats more than their Citadel counterparts, their paint streaked gray. Masked watchers were even clinging to the pipes.

Toast caught someone pulling themselves up, strong and fluid. Polecats, they had to be – the famously insane Gastown fighters trained to climb, swing, and seize from counterbalanced poles. One of them had snatched her on the Fury Road and delivered her back to the Immortan.

Toast pressed the scar on her right cheekbone and breathed, reminding herself that she was the survivor, not him. Furiosa had already stepped down and been replaced in the front seat by a War Boy. Ace and History were out, both of them helping Cheedo get down without tangling in her dress. Toast put her hand on her pistol and followed.

It was actually better on the ground, with Furiosa and the Ace on the alert, and all of them surrounded by nine War Boys. The irony that the War Boys who’d pursued Toast on the Fury Road were making her feel safe gave her mouth a tilt against the mob. When they were all in a formation, the gray man stepped forwards, opening his hands.

“Welcome to Gastown. I am the Arbiter. Here in Gastown, I am the Voice, the Law, and a Chief Executive Officer of our Directing Board. You are the wonder of this cruel Wasteland. Join Gastown here, that we may all withstand.” He made a beckoning bow.

Furiosa stepped back so that Cheedo was in the front. The crowd, quiet as they were, hushed more. Toast held her breath. “I am Cheedo of the Citadel. I speak for the Citadel Council as we meet. We are pleased to come in peace, honoring past trade, to – to create a new agreement with Gastown. We hope to bring a green beginning to a new era.” With a gesture, she scattered a handful of precious leaves in front of her.

“The Citadel’s daughter! I kiss your hand.” The Arbiter swooped forwards and lifted her hand to his lips. Toast grimaced.

“Imperator Furiosa requires no introduction, nor her War Boys.” The Arbiter’s eyes pinned Toast. “Are you the Imperator’s aide?”

“She is,” said a smooth old voice beside her. “Allow me to make Toast the Knowing known to you – veteran of the Fury Road.” Toast was relieved when the Arbiter’s attention shifted. “Myself, I am the History Man.” He raised a hand with two fingers on each side, split to make a V-sign, eyes twinkling. “I say unto you: live long and prosper.”

The Arbiter threw back his head in a ringing laugh. “Playing the apocalypse to the hilt! I like you already.” He flung an arm around History’s shoulder, as if they’d been friends forever. Toast sensed a wave of approval from the Gastown crowd at this. “You and I will drink tonight. We all will – once you are settled, we dine together. Let’s get you to your lodgings.”

Slowly, their entire group began to progress forward. Toast was distracted as they passed over a footbridge. “Watch out, Cheedo,” she said. Emaciated beggars were reaching up to them, moaning, almost able to reach Cheedo’s green dress hem. Why hadn’t anybody told them about this? She had nothing at her side but her holstered pistol.

The Arbiter looked back. “Don’t get the beggars started. You’ve got your Wretched caste at the Citadel, I’m sure you understand.” The History Man used a dramatic look around as a chance to slip out from the Arbiter’s embrace and drop back.

When they were over the bridge, the pipe works thickened. Before they could go down a shadowy corridor woven of pipes and tubes, the Ace stopped them all. “Wait up, we want the way cleared. You Polecats! Down!” Shadows in the corridor pipes flowed and swung, goggles and resentful eyes flashing. The War Boys tightened around them – just in time.

Right where the corridor began, someone swung down in front of them. Toast saw two mismatched boots, short solid legs, a leather jacket, and a mask. The Polecat let go and dropped to the ground. The Gastown Flamers and the War Boys covered the front with their weapons. Furiosa kept her weapon down, and stopped the Ace from raising his.

The Polecat pointed and said, muffled by the mask, “One-Hand! Imperator Furiosa! I- I challenge you to the Court. For a blood kin death.”

The Arbiter found his voice first, saying, “Our recent road war and its casualties are about to be covered under a new treaty. I, for one, like eating.”

“N-not under treaty! Separate. I was a Rock Rider. Furiosa was a free agent then – rebel, not Citadel. She shot my brother down.”

Furiosa said, “Why should I believe this?”

A rough voice from the crowd called, “Believe! Believe!” They turned to see three Rock Riders, complete with their helmet-masks and amulets, up against the grid of pipes, hammering them. The crowd took up the din immediately, only stopping at a gesture from the Arbiter.

The second Rider growled, “He’s dead, all right, and she left our tribe – said she’d find a way to revenge.”

She? Toast blinked at the masked, trembling challenger. Once she’d realized, Toast couldn’t unsee it, no matter how much she wanted to. She was a woman, too – and she was removing her mask. When her blanched face was free, she turned to show the Arbiter the Gastown brand, hot and angry on the back of her neck.

The Arbiter said, “A kin blood death up to first cousin accomplished during the three days when Furiosa was an entity independent of the Citadel? With a branded accuser and witnesses? Legally, in Gastown, she can challenge before the Amnesty.” He turned to Furiosa. “As the challenged, you are entitled to your hour at the Court –again, before the next Amnesty.”

“What sort of legal representation does she need?” asked the History Man.

The Arbiter grinned at him. “This Court is simpler than the courts you and I once knew. It’s an old netball court where Gastown holds personal duels, a challenge to unarmed combat to the death. No proxies, to make it a deterrent, instead of a bloodbath. We have our Thunderdome for that…”

The third Rock Rider held a hand through the pipes to beseech, “Stand down, Kezia, come home!”

The woman cried out again in her shrill, heartbroken voice. “You and I, One-Hand, for my brother’s death!”

Ignoring her, the Arbiter said, “Another legal approach is to weigh the Citadel’s Imperator against a tribeless feral. In which case, I have a simple solution.” The Arbiter snapped his fingers. The two enforcers hoisted their flamethrowers at the woman. “Shall we?”

Cheedo covered her mouth with her hands. Toast heard herself gasp, “No!”

Furiosa barked, “Leave her! I accept!”

Everyone froze. The challenging woman managed to say, “When?”

“Hour before the Amnesty. At the Court,” said Furiosa.

“Done. Each side to bring two witnesses.” The Arbiter gestured, and the flamethrowers went down. One of the Rock Riders jerked the woman off the walkway, to one side, as the Arbiter got them moving again. They were caged in the pipes, and behind the metal, the Gastown mob watched and murmured.

“This must be resolved before contracts are made, and that does include our mutual trade.” The Arbiter waved his hand. “A mere technicality. No cause for sorrow. We dine tonight and discuss tomorrow. If it goes smoothly, have I my way, we conclude and sign the first Amnesty day. And announce the refreshed alliance at the Thunderdome.” The crowd flowed away from them as they began to move forwards again.

“Joe-damn Gastown. Always something. Good thing we came early,” growled the Ace.

Cheedo hustled up to walk beside Furiosa. “Why are you doing it at the last moment?”

The Ace moved so that Cheedo was walking between him and Furiosa. “Let her live that long. Or let her change her mind and run.”

“I’ll do what I can tonight and tomorrow,” said Furiosa, quietly. “Taking anything for granted isn’t…surviving.”

Despite Cheedo in the middle, Ace and Furiosa were in some shared fierce zone as they paced down the pipes. Toast tried to pin down the Rock Rider’s deaths in the confusion of her Fury Road memories – and couldn’t. She remembered the Rock Riders accusing Furiosa and their quick attack, then reloading Furiosa’s rifle when Angharad fumbled it, but then Max had taken the gun. Maybe. At least two had gone under the wheels. The History Man was trailing, and Toast dropped back to him.

“You’re being quiet.”

“I never minded the Rock Riders,” he muttered. “They try to act as a collective, all agreeing. And I worry when killing someone bare-handed is a more ethical choice than subjecting them to flamethrowers.” The pipe corridor ended, opening onto a tall, squared Before-time building, stained gray with refinery smoke. He added, “Who puts a residential tower in the middle of an oil refinery?”

The Arbiter had an ear out for him and replied. “Nobody. This was jerry-rigged on top of the refinery office. The Citadel rooms are on the last of the original floors. The executive suite!” An observation tower next door had been blown out into three more floors, widely separated. “Up there was Scabrous and the interrogation space. We’ll be dining in the penthouse. Go up to the roof and get the second elevator. Here’s the first one. Press the buttons for the top floor – those are the Citadel quarters.”

The elevator was far sleeker than the crude lifts at the Citadel. It only held six people at a time, and closed and opened with a warped electronic ping. Ace and a group of War Boys went up first, and when a War Boy came down to say the space was all right, the other negotiators boarded.

The doors opened with another ping. “This is strange,” said Cheedo. “I thought it would be nicer?”

“When I was little, on the Broken Coast, we lived in Before-Time houses kind of like this.” She was reminded of it by the windows, the insubstantial smoothness, and the dimness away from the windows, in rooms that used to have electric light. The space’s colors were dingy white and gray and blue. Grimy, worn carpeting held chipped or frayed Before-time furnishings. There was a central room, two side rooms with windows, and a long, narrow, windowless space with pallets crammed on metal shelves. One wall had three framed Before-time photographs: the refinery, clean and silver in the sun; a group of happy people in white and colored outfits playing a sportsball game; and a pure white tanker truck being filled up with shimmering, clear liquid.

Next to the elevator, the wall held storage blocks, with a water sink like the one in the Vault. Toast turned a tap, and water gushed out, foaming. She stood back. Cheedo watched. The water changed from white, to brown, to a light gray. Toast turned it off. The remaining water left a slightly iridescent film on the sink. “I didn’t know water could be so many colors,” said Cheedo.

The Ace emerged and told everyone where they were billeted. The War Boys were delighted to be bunked in the largest room, which had once been the Immortan’s. None of the women looked in there. “Furiosa, Sisters, it’s most secure in here,” said the Ace, gesturing to the windowless former closet. Furiosa immediately claimed the front bunk with her rifle. Toast picked a pallet, not happily. This bunk room had the old-boots-extra-guzzoline smell of unwashed War Boys.

She and Furiosa were alone in the unlit bunk room. Furiosa took out her blued-steel pistol and opened its chamber, checking it in the dimness. Toast had learned that Furiosa this when she was thinking, and she admired Furiosa’s restraint. If Toast owned that gorgeous pistol, she’d be checking it every two minutes. Furiosa had let her try a few rounds of it once at the firing range and she’d yearned for it ever since.

When Furiosa clicked the pistol closed again, Toast said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I lost it. I shouldn’t have said anything out there during the challenge.”

Furiosa looked startled. “I didn’t hear you say anything.”

Toast was relieved that it wasn’t her fault, but not being heard had a sting. “What can I do to help?”

“Nothing. This is my fight…the Ace was right about Gastown. It was like this at the Citadel, too. Someone spoiling for a fight with me. You’ll need to watch out for it, in time.” Slow and deep and bitter, she said, “There’s always some sphincter.”

Furiosa’s voice lightened as she added, “For once it’s a woman. With a decent reason. It’s cleaner.” Toast’s feeling that it was even worse because it was a woman felt jammed in her throat.

Furiosa gave Toast's shoulder a touch, something she hardly ever did. “Look out for Cheedo.”

“I will. I always do.”

Furiosa gave a nod, holstered her pistol, and went back out into the main room.

Out there, the Ace was saying, “History, you and me and another War Boy or three will be in the senior officers’ room, not that any of us deserve it.” Furiosa went to examine this, and Toast followed. This room had a metal balcony with a barred door. “This’ll be where Max is in and out.” Furiosa went out onto the balcony, followed by a War Boy. Toast went back inside.

“Hah. From the Wretched to an Imperator’s chamber.” The History Man was looking around beside the water tap. “A kitchenette. With an electric kettle. Plugged in! Is there power?” He flicked its switch and sighed when a tiny red light went on.

“You told the Council that we should free ourselves from Before-time tech. That we needed to think sustainably for our children’s children,” snapped Toast.

He looked embarrassed. “I know. But for the first half of my life, one of these kettles and a cup of tea meant…I was home.”

Furiosa came in from the balcony with Max. He must have been trailing them all along, unseen. The elevator was so slow that his back access from the balcony might be faster, thought Toast. Suddenly, all the War Boys found a reason to cluster around the Ace on the other side of the main room. Max ignored them, nodded at History, smiled at Cheedo, and said to Toast, “Hey. Need a haircut, or a headband. Can’t shoot with hair in your eyes.”

“Nice to see you, too. Furiosa just got challenged---”

“Watched it. It happens. Gastown. She’ll take the Rider.” Max looked around. “You all heard about the cholera warning?” Toast caught a wordless rapid-fire between Max and Furiosa. Max sent a quizzical glance, Furiosa barely nodded. Max gave his mouth a satisfied twitch and shrugged. Furiosa still frowned.

At the same time, Cheedo was saying, “We just had thirty cases of that at the Citadel. All you have to do is…drink lots of water…” She trailed off, realizing how impossible this was for most of the Wasteland.

Furiosa said, “Hope it stays under control. War Boys, eat and drink only what we brought. The rest of us, too. Unless it’s events like this dinner.”

One of the War Boys turned to the Ace. “Not even the crickets?”

“No crickets,” the Ace said, firmly. Even Max looked disappointed at that.

“Washing with soap helps! There’s soap here,” said Cheedo, lifting a tablet beside the main sink.

Toast saw them all getting back to normal after their shock. The Ace began to tell the War Boys who was on guard when, their shifts for going to the Gastown night markets, and how to keep the quarters secure. “Our weak points are in and out – the escalator, dumbest bottleneck I ever saw, and the metal ladders out back, which are too easy. Two of you on each point at all times unless the Imperator or I say otherwise.” He wasn’t helped by the History Man turning on the sink again and recruiting one of the War Boys to try (ludicrously, in Toast’s opinion) to set the sink water on fire.

Furiosa was examining her living hand, dirty from the journey there and the grease of her pistol, while talking low to update Max. Despite his flip words earlier, Max was gazing at a blank wall as if it was a deep, troubling vista.

Cheedo began to fuss in a bag, taking out her gold and black cosmetics. “We need to get ready for dinner. Let me do your eyes, Toast,” she said. “They’ll all be looking at us again.” At the Citadel, Toast would have smiled and said it wasn’t important. Now, Toast went to see what Cheedo could do.

They all jumped as the sink whooshed into a basin of flames.

In her most present voice since the challenge, Furiosa said, “Water, burning - how?”

Toast sat down in front of Cheedo. “Looks like we do have some leverage with Gastown.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is the Gastown tap water flammable? Because of residual natural gas in the Gastown ground water, due to over-drilling for oil in the immediate area disrupting boundaries between water, oil, and natural gas deposits.


	5. Formalities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The new leaders of Gastown and the Bullet Farm meet the Citadel team at a formal dinner. Toast is shocked to find an old Wives' tale from the Vault is true, and Furiosa is tested as she dines. The banter is sharp, the dice are rolled, and trust is measured by the glass.

The elevator that took them to the Establishment penthouse in Gastown reminded Toast of the very few Citadel lifts: a creaking, barred, terrifying box of metal. They were at the level of the smokestacks and distilling towers, close enough to hear the natural gas flames hiss and snap. When a wind blew, Cheedo coughed and batted cinder-flakes off her dress. Toast helped her. “I can’t believe this elevator held the People Eater. He was so bloated!”

“He was so gross!” Cheedo agreed.

“Us Wretched would see him going by, once in a blue moon,” said the History Man. “The uber-accountant of the Immortan’s empire! A sack of corruption. Pinstripes, privilege, and pervery.”

“He’s dead. Forget him,” said Furiosa. “He’s gone. We wouldn’t be here to negotiate, otherwise.” The elevator came to a halt with a shriek of metal.

For the penthouse, the top of an observation tower had been replaced with a large room, windows on all sides, bisected with a black curtain. There was a two-handspan gap between the elevator and the entrance. They flung themselves over the threshold into the company of the Arbiter and two hooded, armed men. A handful of yellow-clay War Boys hovered near the curtain. “Bullet Farm’s here,” said Ace.

Tired of protocol already, the Citadel team arranged themselves. They went up to the window, Cheedo rustling her dress, then saying, “On behalf of the Citadel, I greet the –the Bullet Farm representatives.” It wasn’t Cheedo’s best, and she went crimson, but Toast completely understood.

The Bullet Farm people had turned around as Cheedo spoke. One ammunition-edged hood sheltered a tired, pouchy, blunt older man, pasty-skinned. The other shadowed the handsomest man she’d ever seen. Like Toast, he had smooth, light brown skin and full lips, with a man’s strong jaw and tilted amber eyes. A bullet-shaped scar highlighted each cheekbone.

“Here from the Bullet Farm, call me Captain. My aide and adopted son, known as Lookout.” Toast rocked back. After the Immortan’s insistence on having a son of his own, this was drastic. “Imperator, I hope we can set aside your differences with our past establishment? For mutual benefit?” He held out a liver-spotted hand. “Saltpeter’s a fertilizer as well as a gunpowder.” It was nicely said, considering they’d refused any Citadel communications for a hundred days, then tried a skirmish. Toast thought they must be down to their last backup food supplies, and tired of taking their chances with Gastown ground water.

“We can try,” said Furiosa, cautiously. They shook. The Arbiter, in the background, steepled his hands in happiness.

Cheedo peered at Lookout inquisitively, then went up. “I am Cheedo, the voice of the Citadel.” While Cheedo introduced the others, he gaped at her in suppressed terror. Toast realized that he was as young as Cheedo, just decently grown. He might have done better talking to Cheedo if he’d been a War Boy, living in their hurly-burly and learning how to get along, instead of being picked out to be a full-life officer so young. The elevator was creaking in arrival, and she turned.

This time, the metal door opened and two Gastown War boys leapt out. The Arbiter declared, “Gastown’s current Warlord proxy, Nek’Minute, and his second, Munted. Be known to the Bullet Farm and the Citadel!”

Nek’Minute didn’t walk into the room: he prowled, veering to one side, then walking back across, taking in everything and everyone. Solid with muscle for a War Boy, not overly tall, Toast thought that, again, under the paint was a skin that matched her own. His black vest was dragged down by a weight on one side. “Nek’Minute – is that another name for a timer in a car?” Cheedo asked.

Toast eyed his half-meter machete and replied, “I think it means that if you look at him wrong, next minute, you’re dead.”

“That’s right! That’s right! They named you the Knowing and that’s right, too.” Nek’Minute bounded over to Toast.

He was about her age. “You’re the war leader? What happened here?”

“I was leading the Bridge team. Then the news came in. Had a head start to collect my Boys.” Nek’Minute had a War Boy’s relish for battle stories, and he went through a litany of intercene duels, poisonings, and a hand-to-hand battle that had decimated Gastown Imperators and War Boys alike. “Me, I looked out for my Boys at the Refinery. Fire and steel! We kept it together, watching the bigheads in there. Me, Munted, and our crew.”

Tall, lanky and raw, Munted was so ugly he was interesting-looking, wearing a black square-topped cap with a back flap hiding his neck. Toast thought of a younger Ace. He had a closed-mouthed smile and mumbled, “What happened at the Cidatel, eh?”

“What did you hear?” Toast asked. The Ace gravitated to them.

Nek’Minute thrust his chest out. “I got the pure truth from the Polecats who made it back. The Imperator drew out the Triumverate with you Wives. The Rock Riders blew their canyon for her. She and the Bullet Farmer had a killing duel in the Bog and he died blind.” He gave Furiosa a wary, impressed look. “She went to the heart of the Salt and came back with a hundred ferals and a dead War Boy come back to life. Ten of her ferals killed the People Eater and blew his ride like the rising sun. Then you two and the Imperator shredded the Immortan and the Citadel was yours. She fed the dead Immortan to her ferals!” He made the V8 sign.

“Could’ve been how,” grinned the Ace. “I got knocked out early.”

“You tell it so well,” said Cheedo, eyes sparkling.

“That’s where I got this scar,” said Toast, a finger on her right cheek. Then she thought of Angharad, of the War Boy who’d died after all, and the miserable Rock Rider challenging Furiosa. Nek’Minute was a War Boy in his prime. War remained a game with dying historic as the prize. And he was a meeting or two away from being Gastown’s Warlord.

Nek’Minute was admiring her scar when the elevator ground open a third time. Gastown servants, gray and masked, helped out the last dignitaries: a lean old man with a fixed stare and a gray beard, in a blue coverall, and a cloaked figure.

The old man stalked into the room, took them all in flatly, and announced, “Andrew Wilson Parteger, Ph.D. Petroleum chemist. The Worksman.” He stuck his hand out, as if someone had told him he was supposed to shake hands, but he wasn’t clear, himself, on the concept. The Ace, nearest him, gingerly shook.

There was a rustle of fabric beside her. Toast turned. This person wasn’t cloaked, they were veiled. The black veils went to the floor. All that was revealed were two eyes that had to be a woman’s eyes. “Welcome again to Gastown. I am known here as the Jade, and I, too, am on our Executive Board. I particularly wanted to meet you. It’s my understanding that you are both former Wives of the Immortan?” Her voice had a sleek undertone.

“Yes,” said Cheedo. She swallowed.

Toast said, “Cheedo was hardly there at all. She was in waiting. I’d been there a thousand days.” She looked up at this woman, tall as Angharad had been, determined to stand down their shame.

The Jade might have been named for her eyes, huge, hazel-green, as signal-laden as Furiosa and Max in the same room. They narrowed in acknowledgement and fluttered in complicity. “I had almost two thousand. Times were different eight thousand days past. My second child would have served, but the Immortan was fussy about things like an extra arm. We had a standing offer from Gastown in our day to come here when we were released, and I’ve been here ever since.”

The offer from Gastown had been a legend amongst the Wives. Only one Wife had ever done it, they told each other, in the middle of the night, shivering in horror or disgust, reassuring themselves that there was something worse out there than the Vault. “We had it too…what…do you do here?”

The Jade gave her chin a proud lift, like Furiosa did sometimes. “I went from being one favorite to another – the People Eater was in the palm of my hand.”

For Toast, the room lurched.

Over her shoulder, Toast caught a glimpse of Furiosa gone white with appallment, Cheedo shocked blank, the Ace at a loss. “But how fascinating,” the History Man said, leaving the Bullet Farmers to stand before the Jade. “Used to watch him driving by, all pomp and circumstance. I’ve always wondered what he was like. What can you tell me?”

Toast extracted herself to find refuge at the windows furthest away from the Jade. Cheedo followed her. They found themselves standing beside the Arbiter. Quietly, he said, just to them, “After her involvement with old P.E., the Jade is a treasure mine of information. Whatever I don’t know about this place, she does.” A wry undertone indicated bemused tolerance and superior morals. “Our Worksman has his quirks. Understanding our refinery here is enough to drive a man mad, so we make allowances. No worries required, unless you lift a hand against the pipes. What are you hoping for in Gastown?”

Cheedo said, “I’d love to go to the Night Market.”

“Trade! We want to keep being that for the Citadel.” He turned to Toast. “Yourself?”

Toast straightened. “Some of everything. The last thing we need is warlords taking pieces out of each other.”

The Arbiter nodded. “A fresh way of putting it. Admirably direct.”

Before she could reply, two masked servants pulled back the black curtain that split the room, revealing more servants and a table. “Ah. We dine.”

The History Man eyed the table. “Wordburger: Rich Diverus, he made a feast.”

Toast had only seen anything to touch it in the Vault. A long table draped in black fabric was surrounded by baroque metal chairs. Along the table’s length were dusty, greenish bottles, small kerosene lanterns, and crystal bowls heaped with bleached animal bones, white feathers, and sparkling minerals. Gray, masked servants stood behind each chair, one per person, and others were in waiting at a curtained area to one side.

Ushered to a seat, Toast looked down at an array of chrome. She wasn’t going to get a minute to collect herself sitting here. Her place had four forks, three spoons, four knives, a metal pick, six glasses, and an unchipped white china plate topped by a black piece of fabric. The final touch was a chrome-trimmed animal skull filled with pinkish salt. Toast plunked down, wondering wildly if she could pocket the skull and take it back to the Dag. Her Sisters and the Citadel had never felt further away.

* * *

When they were all seated, the Arbiter declared, “Please, be at ease. Tonight we talk, we meet, we learn; tomorrow our business will have its turn. We have no goals here save to relax and enjoy each other’s company.” In her mind, Furiosa could hear Max grumbling, in his old-fashioned way: _yeah, right._

The long table was as detailed as a rig, with its crew exactly placed. Their two factions alternated. She was at one end, the Arbiter to her left, Andrew to her right. The rest of the right side was occupied by Cheedo, Captain, Munter, and the Ace. The Jade had the end seat. Next to the Arbiter was Lookout, Toast, Nek’Minute, and the History Man. The only one she could help quickly would be Cheedo. Their two War Boys were stuck standing and unfed, like the servants. She signalled one to stand behind Cheedo, and the other behind Toast.

The scarred side of the Arbiter’s face was next to her prosthetic arm. He said, “Tomorrow is my busiest day of the year as everyone concludes legal business before the Amnesty. So, I won’t be at the meetings. I will see you at the Court – and afterwards, I’m certain. For you and I, this is our best chance to get to know each other.”

A six-fingered servant put a bowl put in front of Furiosa, with soup, then decanted some fluid into one of her glasses. The Arbiter announced, “Wait! After recent events, each dish is a game of chance! We have adopted a ritual here, to avoid poisoning. Isn’t that right, my lady Jade?”

“Just as we have our laws to keep people from being downed by flamethrowers in the street,” the Jade replied. Along the table, Citadel eyes widened and the History Man murmured a wordburger. The Gastown diners treated this as business as usual.

The Arbiter turned to Furiosa. “The Imperator’s coolness under fire makes such things unnecessary. Please do us the honor of rolling these dice.” Furiosa shook the dice cup and rolled a pair of sixes. “Boxcars! An excellent omen for trade between us. Wait a moment while our dishes are rearranged.” Servants moved everyone’s plate and glass one seat to the left. Furiosa was now about to eat the soup and drink the glass that had been served to the Arbiter.

Quickly, she checked on Cheedo. Cheedo had met the eyes of Lookout opposite her and, very deliberately, picked up one of her spoons. The tall boy picked up the same type of spoon she had. Furiosa picked up that spoon, too, though they all seemed about the same. As she ate, the Arbiter spoke. “I’d like to say I approve of you bringing the Wretched into the fold at the Citadel.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“I’m sure they make good workers. Any good fighters amongst them? If some wished to try their luck at the Thunderdome, it would make a wonderful spectacle. The cannibal Wretched versus the scavs!”

Furiosa felt her brow tight under her Imperator’s black. “True about the good workers. Why does Gastown allow vengeance duels and the Thunderdome? Waste of good fighters.”

The Arbiter’s eyes flashed. “The same reason the Citadel has Valhalla for half-life War Boys. Control.”

“We’ve made changes lately. For the better.” Furiosa put her spoon down. She was reminded of other tables where she’d had a seat as one of Immortan Joe’s favorite Imperators. With different grim old men, convinced they ran the world. The memories undermined her appetite.

Cheedo, offered the dice, rolled a four, and another round of plates were whisked around accordingly. Most of the men’s eyes stayed stuck on Cheedo’s beauty afterwards, but not, she noticed, the Arbiter’s. His looks were triangulated amongst herself, the Jade, and the History Man. She should have directed the War Boys differently. If she changed them around now, the Arbiter would definitely notice.

Furiosa’s latest serving was a delicate arrangement of Citadel greens, laced with some dark oil. The salad was topped by a perfect, creamy witchetty grub, long as a finger and thick as a thumb. The grub curled and moved its mandibles.

“Another benefit of the Thunderdome and the Amnesty is that they make us a goal, rather than a target, for ferals and tribes like the Wretched or the Buzzards. Gastown has been the neutral edge of the Triumverate. This area has been controlled and it’s about to go wild – unless we unite.” She made a quiet noise of agreement, like Max did, the kind that avoided overcommitment.

Furiosa reflected that, between Max and the reviving Wretched, she could use some more tribal ferals. Using the edge of her fork, Furiosa beheaded her witchetty, slid it up, and ate it in one delicious bite, as she’d been taught in the Green Place. She cupped her mouth in her hand to extract the witchetty skin, which she placed on the side of her plate.

“You have traveled, I see. It’s been a while since these were found anywhere near here.” The Arbiter was forking up salad first. “I heard your name long before this day: a very successful field Imperator for the Immortan, I recall.”

Furiosa changed the subject immediately. “How did you come here?”

He settled back in his seat. “In the Before-time, I was a petroleum lawyer. Here because I drew the short straw on a case, but I wasn’t about to go back to Sydney after the end of the world dropped thirty megatons on it. Immortan Joe rolled in a few years later and colonized us. He gave us the People Eater.” He nudged his wichetty, now naked in the dark oil on his plate. “Later, Scabrous Scrotus.” His fork split the wichetty in the middle: it curled in its death throes. “No love lost between them and I. I’ve outlasted them all.” A final stab beheaded it, and he ate, patiently.

Toast, given the dice, rolled a two. “Snake eyes! Snake eyes!” the Gastown War Boys chorused, laughing. They were served slow-poached lizard morsels on a green sauce. The Arbiter said, “I shouldn’t be monopolizing you.” Across the table, he ordered, “Andrew, talk to the Imperator.”

Furiosa turned to her right and asked, “Can you tell me about the refinery works?” The next fifteen minutes were a torrent of information. The seven-level distilling system was genuinely interesting. Then the chemistry began, and a trail of words without context. Hydrocrackers. Alkylation units. Reaction rates. Sulfinol absorption process followed by the methanator. Amidst the barrage, Furiosa realized that the History Man’s _wordburger_ warnings forgave any hearers who did not understand what he meant - unlike this man's words.

The Jade rolled the dice. “A hard ten,” she said. “My absolute favorite.” The Gastown men at her end of the table roared with laughter. This round of food was a small grilled animal apiece, on the bone.

Cheedo had listened in (the Captain was ignoring her) and rescued Furiosa from Andrew by saying, “Can you tell me more about what they made from guzzoline in the Before-Time?” The engineer turned to Cheedo and began to recite a long, long list.

Furiosa used a knife in her prosthetic to sliver some meat. What was she eating? Max would know. Max would be stabbing the knife in the table and eating with his hands by now. No, he’d be gone. Driving off with him had never seemed better. The Arbiter said, “My apologies, Imperator. I understand if you need a moment. Andrew Wilson Parteger, Ph.D., doesn’t come with an off switch. Or any social graces. He lives, breathes, _is_ the refinery works.”

Neutrally, she said, “He was interesting. Our History Man will talk to him tomorrow.”

The Arbiter mused, “You truly were interested, to last that long listening to him.”

“I started out as a mechanic. I like how things work.”

“Some would find that unusual for a woman. Myself, I find that power and talent have no gender – man or woman is irrelevant.” It seemed a compliment, but it brushed aside the struggle of her life.

“And the Immortan had you driving a truck. No wonder you felt like a change of regime.” Before she could start on the complexities of the Rig runs and defense, he murmured, “You’ve made many changes as the Citadel’s new Warlord. Including changes to the lockdowns. Any actions planned? We’re interested to know, as your allies. There’s a few troublesome settlements…if you could include them, we’d make it worth your while.”

“Mph,” she managed. Inside, she clenched with rage. If he knew that, he had a spy. A spy inside the Citadel. Not close enough for the truth, but much, much too close. Letting her know was a subtle threat. And he was trying to bribe them. On her plate, bones snapped under the knife.

The other end of the table was getting along with greater ease. Ace and Munted and the Captain next to him were using the table implements as props to go through a past road war and its strategy. Nek’Minute and Toast were talking intensely – when Toast gave in to hand gestures, she was engaged. Cheedo was asking the Worksman a question whenever he stopped talking, to get him going again. Lookout was chewing his bones while silently gazing at Cheedo. The Jade was ordering servants around, bantering with the History Man, and flattering the fighting men. Her dark veiling blended into the table and the curtains behind her, making her almost invisible, even as her voice carried. Furiosa caught the flash of her eyes, the only green thing not from the Citadel she had seen in Gastown.

The dice were returned to Furiosa. “One last roll,” the Arbiter encouraged. She rolled an eleven. To her annoyance, a perfect peach was removed from in front of her and placed before the Arbiter. Her final glass was filled, which she ignored, as she had all the others, save for the water glass. The Arbiter, she noted, lifted his glasses for a sip, then let them sit.

Furiosa bit into her peach as the Arbiter said, “Just tearing into it, eh?”

She glanced around and saw the Gastown diners using a knife and fork yet again. Furiosa said, coldly, “This is fine at the Citadel.”

“Noted for the Wasteland, Imperator.”

When Furiosa set the peach stone on her plate, the Arbiter tinged his glass for quiet. The military men fell to order instantly, leaving the History Man and the Jade chattering into sudden quiet.

The Jade was saying, “Old P.E. was consistent. He wasn’t a man to resist a desire, as you could tell by looking at him.”

“Wordburger: Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek headed men and those that sleep a-night,” said History, with a smile.

The Arbiter continued. “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” This rang like more of the wordburger - and an attack. And here she’d thought the Arbiter liked the History Man best of all of them.

History saw it as clearly as she did. He had leaned forwards to look down the dim, rich table and meet her eyes. “Say rather, ‘A noble Roman, and well given.’ I will not say, fear not, Caesar, because none of us is Caesar now.”

A defense, or a responding threat? Max would have read the question off her face. The History Man, all words, took his eyes away too soon.

“For the moment,” said the Arbiter. Then, he stood, glass in hand himself.

“I wish to make a final toast – and I ask you all to drink from the glass just poured for you, as a sign that we trust each other, now. Citadel, fragile as our ravaged earth, I salute your survival and rebirth. Imperator, cool in the fire of Gastown, may those who defy you be broken down. Starting at the Court tomorrow.”

He lifted his glass. Its liquid was clear. “To a new alliance: a new empire to draw all roads.”

Furiosa resolved to set things right tomorrow, free of the Arbiter. And to scour the Citadel when she returned. She lifted her glass. Cheedo found hers, too, and spoke. “To a new alliance.”

Unevenly, they all drank.

The liquor went down oddly oily, followed by a guzzoline burn. The fire eradicated the soft fragrance of Citadel fruit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers:  
>  _Rich Diverus, he made a feast, and he invited all his friends, and gentry of the best_ – Childe Harold ballad 56B, _Dives and Lazarus_ , from the Biblical parable of a rich man and a beggar.  
>  _Let me have men about me…_ Quote exchange here from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.


	6. Market Value

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The men of the Citadel negotiating party head out to the Gastown night markets. Max discovers another Fury Road survivor, and deciding how to handle him may shatter him and Furiosa.

Max, Furiosa, and the Ace had agreed that Max should enter and leave the Citadel rooms in Gastown’s Establishment tower as rarely as possible. This left him waiting for the Citadel’s negotiators to return from their meal with the Gastown elite. With two options, waiting in a room that smelled like War Boys or one that had actual War Boys in it, Max chose the smell. The door of the small bunkroom closed solidly. He rammed the shelving up against the door and lay down on the bunk that held Furiosa’s rifle.

Max managed a tolerable nap, fingers curled into the rifle. The boasting of the first round of War Boys returning from the night markets woke him. After the sly Gastown words sliding around, he disliked the War Boys’ unsettling eloquence more than ever. He shoved the shelving back and stayed tense on the bunk until he heard other voices.

Max slid out as the negotiators’ return filled the main room and waited with his back against the bunkroom door. Everyone was talking at once, until Furiosa said, “That’s a lot of information. Anything that can’t wait until tomorrow?” Forced to think, they all had to admit that nothing was urgent.

Finally, Furiosa came his way, looking drained. Max lifted one brow. Furiosa replied, “I was next to the Arbiter at dinner.”

“Sorry. How much were you worth?”

Furiosa provided a half-smile. “A raised glass and being dismissed until he’s sure I survive tomorrow.” She lowered her voice. “Thanks for bringing History up to the Citadel. He helped.” Max made a pleased noise.

Max thought about her fight tomorrow, and set aside his longing to be with her that night, even just to sit together a while. Instead, he moved to let her access the bunkroom and said, “Best thing to do is get some sleep---”

Furiosa’s words overlapped his. “With everything tomorrow, I ought to sleep--” They both broke off.

Max heard Cheedo ask Toast, “Are you tired? I’m tired.”

Toast replied, “I just don’t want to be awake in a world where anyone would voluntarily schlang the People Eater.” The three women all laughed, softly.

Max was too disgusted to laugh, or even ask. Furiosa tried herding the Sisters into the bunkroom, but relented when they wanted to go to the washroom and clean off their eye paint. He could tell she just wanted them out of the way while she sorted out the War Boys. He backed towards the room with the balcony exit while she praised the War Boys who’d guarded over the dinner and the space, giving them permission to go out to the night markets. The Ace was going, as well. Some trade goods were retrieved and handed around.

The History Man tangled up this process by declaring, “A night out with the blokes? _Wordburger: bright lights, big city._ I’ll come with you.”

While the War Boys chortled and the Ace pulled History aside for a moment, Furiosa caught Max’s eyes. They both looked upwards, briefly. Furiosa gestured with her chin at the History Man. Max frowned, giving his head a shake. Furiosa touched the back of her neck – on her Citadel brand – and flicked her eyes back at the old man. Max caught her meaning. Max had brought the History Man up to the Citadel after the end of Immortan Joe, and he didn’t have the skull-brand. Either Furiosa was trying to not be the Immortan again, tonight, by letting History exercise his curiosity after his help. Or, being unbranded, as well as a Wasteland ancient, he needed protection on the Gastown streets. Probably both.

Max sighed, inclining his head once. He put his two hands flat together and raised one, like the sun rising above the horizon. Furiosa nodded. Max would follow the group around the Gastown night markets and check in with Furiosa at dawn. He gave her a final look of understanding and left embraced by their wordless trust. In Max’s experience, the more things needed explaining, the more words were required, the worse off he was.

Descending was a careful job. It had been easy enough for the Ace to say Max would go in and out through the back window. Max figured the War Boys and Imperators had used this route to try the night markets on the sly. The Ace was all about defense – a good enough soldier and bodyguard, but thin on Wasteland stealth. Max wrapped his lower face again. He had told them he was only going to do this over full night cover: dawn was pushing it. Outside, he moved slow as a sunrise lizard, avoiding creaks and rattles. Something about the metal ladders triggered his bad knee. There were guards down there, and getting around them took precise timing.

The inside lift was so slow that, by the time Max saw them emerge from the front, he was twenty meters ahead of them and neatly concealed. It was too easy to trail them from inside a layer of pipes. They ignored the ramshackle rickshaws waiting for customers too proud to walk on the Gastown asphalt. Instead, they stopped almost immediately to watch a busking fire-eater.

Max backtracked just in time to hear the History Man saying to the Ace, “No, I won’t join you. I’m too old-fashioned and too old. A breath of urbanity is all I want.”

The Ace sounded relieved. “This lot’s fresh out. It’ll be their first time at the brothels.” Max felt sick.

“So much better than the Immortan’s raids.”

The Ace nodded. “Always a defense man myself, if you understand me.”

“The, ah, workers can _leave_ the brothels here?” inquired History.

The Ace looked thoughtful. “Never asked. Guess I should.”

“You’re a good man, Ace. You tell the Boys what’s what.” The History Man applauded as the fire-eater finished a spectacular exhale. The Ace started, remembering, then applauded too, and the War Boys all imitated him. History took out a bottle of Citadel water and left it for the performer, and they moved along.

The War Boys became rowdier and rowdier, more of a pack, only occasionally cuffed into line by the Ace. The History Man couldn’t resist chiming in with advice, ending with, “To carry on the metaphor, be sure to tell the engine she’s beautiful, afterwards!” Max swallowed bile as he trailed them to the entrance of the better night market.

This began at a small clear square that led into an alley, wide by cramped Gastown standards, in the most southern shantytown. Gastown enforcers with their flamethrowers waited where burning oil barrels and market signs began. They let the Citadel group in as valued customers. Max, sliding out from the pipes, didn’t rate as highly. The enforcers stopped him, demanded that he list his weapons, and warned him that stealing or bad dealing led to Gastown justice at the end of their flamethrowers.

It took Max a solid five minutes to find the Citadel group again, and when he did, he was relieved to find that they were down to two. The War Boys, Max reflected, were never ones for waiting. The Ace and the History Man were ambling along together, chatting low. The two old codgers exchanged a handshake before the Ace peeled off into a building with a second story.

Left to himself, the History Man shut down his smile, looking shrewd and tired instead. He began a considered circuit of the market, taking in the stalls, beggars, hucksters, drug vendors, and the notorious barbecue stand. When he was recognized from entering Gastown earlier, he cracked out the affability again, leaving mercenaries and prostitutes laughing behind him. Without too much delay, Max followed him to where the market ended on the oil bog shore: at a dance hall tent.

This tent was a large, patched pavilion, lit outside with barrels of oil roaring with red fire, and inside with burning kerosene, flickering silver. The History Man seemed amazed, and peered in for several minutes. The wailing, rollicking band in the middle had brought the different Gastown night factions together. Max winced at the din of the music, though some of Gastown’s poorer had gathered outside to hear. Inside, Gastown mates were dancing at one end of the tent; at the other, mismatched shoes flashed below exposed legs. In the middle, Max caught what the History Man was watching.

The crowd swirled around one woman: Furiosa’s challenger. The former Rock Rider was reeling amidst a barrage of free drinks and advice from Gastown warriors. Max frowned. If she was out like this, the question wasn’t whether she’d win or not, but how briefly she’d last. She lifted her left fist and said something that made the fighters around her roar. Then, she flung herself into a group of dancers. Max saw her fall back into an ambiguous beauty’s arms and tilt her head for a hit of chrome. The History Man turned away, shoulders slumping. Max was relieved to follow.

Returning to the start of the market, the History Man reached under his robes and extracted a second bottle of Citadel water to trade. Max felt a flash of anger as he handed it to a crispy cricket vendor, directly disobeying Furiosa’s words to avoid the Gastown food. The water got him more cricket bags than he could hold in his hands. He took his armful to some beggars loitering by the market entrance, then hunched down to talk to them. Max palmed his own forehead and breathed. The old guy was trying to get cholera and leprosy at the same time. It was hard to pick him out from the cluster of beggars. At least he wasn’t going anywhere.

The beggar group was hard up against a narrow stage with black drapery. This was for spiels and shills: anyone could pay to go up and speak to the crowd through a megaphone, or to have a message read out. The night before the Amnesty, they had a full slate. Max listened to a brothel advertisement, a recruitment call from the Bullet Farm, and a cult preacher crying out that water would return, a blessed rain would fall, if he only had more followers. This last one intrigued the History Man so much he left the beggars to talk to the cultist.

Max was about to follow when the stage wrangler declared, “Here’s a man you might need who’s new to Gastown. Lend your ears to Joe Sawbones!” Max wrote it off as some quack about to sell fake medicine – until he spoke. A voice Max knew too, too well was ringing down the market.

_The Organic Mechanic._

Slowly, Max turned to see. The man on stage was less plump, more tanned, and more bearded than Organic had been at the Citadel. He’d had a desert hike, one way or another, to Gastown. His tooled apron was the same and his turn of phrase was unmistakeable. “Cholera got you down? Lumpy thyroid? Alive too long? Joe Sawbones is here to help! I’m the man for your lumps, bumps, burns, and post-combat ventilations. For the Amnesty, a special deal: a two for one euthanasia mate's rate!”

Max’s vision went red. He found himself fighting to breathe. Caged by the memory of his Citadel muzzle, he clawed down his scarf and backed to the edge of the market. The noise and stench and crowd were overwhelming, until Organic spoke again.

Someone yelled a question. Organic hollered back, “Amputation cleanup a speciality. All you voyeurs saw my best work arrive in Gastown today: the arm and life of Imperator Furiosa!” The crowd ooohed. Organic winked and pointed at his querent. “I made a deal with the Imperator and I can make a deal with you! All physical barter items considered! Follow me to my suitably sterile surgical seraglio…” He named an alleyway, and the words sank into Max’s memory, dark as if they’d been inked. He curled his fists and breathed. The world was shifting into a fearsome clarity. He appreciated the irony that he’d found something he wanted at the night market, all unexpected: revenge.

Suddenly, Max heard a different voice beside him and saw green robes. History had come right up to him. “There you are. Did you see the preacher? Close to my age. Decent chap, warned me that some thug was following me – glad I found you. I suppose I should go back.”

Max recovered himself enough to mutter, “Shouldn’t be talking.” He yanked the scarf back up.

The History Man remembered himself and raised his voice. “This is your market, stranger, not mine, and you know best. Guard me back to the Establishment tower and I’ll pay fair, Citadel water. Ten minutes to slake your thirst. What do you say?” He held out his hand.

Max didn’t shake, instead pointing at the market exit. They left together.

The alleys through the pipeworks were quieting down. Max might have pulled himself together more, if not for the old man’s next words. “We’ve been friends of a sort, Max. Is it me, or is no love lost between you and the War Boys? We are all supposed to be the same crew, as your Imperator puts it. A word or two to them would help.”

His rage flared up again. He managed to growl, “They don’t deserve…”

The History Man made a noise of half-agreement. “I hear you. I lived amongst the Wretched in the Citadel’s dust. I have War Boy stories, and wish I didn’t. They don’t deserve the pleasures for sale in Gastown? Perhaps they don’t. They don’t deserve to be human? Perhaps they do. Sometimes that means giving them more than they deserve. In a way as close to human as can be had, after the end of the world.”

Max was stuck on the first part. “If they…you…how do you stand them?”

“Forgiveness.”

The old man gave him an arch look. “ _You_ are the one who brought me up into the Citadel. With all that entails. At first, I was wary. And now?” He sighed, hugely. “I feel for them all. These children in the desert.”

Max had nothing to say to that. They walked for five minutes in silence, Max focusing on the Gastown shadows and their dark potential. When they drew near the tower, the History Man said, “You and I are on the same crew as well. You need to know something that happened at dinner. The Arbiter has recognized Furiosa.”

“What?”

“The Arbiter sees Furiosa’s potential and he is wary. She thinks too much for him. Can you keep an eye out? She’s boxed inside the tower tomorrow day, negotiating defense and trade. The Ace and I agree she is at risk around the duel.”

Max managed, “Mph. I’ll talk to her. Send her out.”

They had arrived. Loudly, the History Man said, “Well done, my good man, here’s my side of the bargain.” He handed over the clear water bottle with a flourish of robes and ambled into the tower.

Max thought he was feeling just right, under the circumstances. Calm enough that his anger was giving him an edge. Ready for some clear-minded revenge. His climb up was easy. At this time of night, the back of the building was intermittently lit or smoked by the flaring Gastown smokestacks. When he got there, Furiosa was waiting for him, sitting straight-backed just below the balcony’s grid, free of her prosthetic. He could only see her when the Gastown chimneys spat their red or blue flames. She said nothing, just looked.

Max swung down and hunched beside her. The balcony caged them together, close enough for him to discern her face. She tilted towards him, both hopeful and worried. This could have been the moment he’d wanted earlier. If his news wasn’t burning him up.

“Organic’s alive.”

Furiosa’s face changed to everything he needed: outrage, disgust, her own fury.

“Set up again in the market here, calling himself Joe Sawbones.”

“Joe?” Furiosa put a world of outrage behind the name.

Max nodded. “Let’s get him.”

She looked down, lips slightly parted. Several of the blue flares huffed at once, and her eyes flashed in the cold light. Max leaned forwards again, his anger ready to kindle into dark heat. He felt her on the brink, as well, tensing for violence. She’d wipe away Organic with him – in blood. He couldn’t wait to owe her for it.

With a breath, she stopped herself short. “I can’t.”

Max froze. She said, “Not without thinking this through.”

Outraged, Max growled, “Think? He’s here. He used me. You told me he hurt those girls. He’s using your name to sell himself.”

It was her turn to freeze in disbelief. Max added, “He’s up there in between the brothel touts, saying he saved your life and you made deals with him.”

A wind suddenly enveloped them in black smoke, and she coughed, hard. When the smoke cleared, she rasped, “You deserve the truth. He did save my life.” She held up her truncated arm. “I was lucky he could. He was as young as I was, then.”

The idea of Organic having known her for so long was maddening. “The deals,” Max insisted.

Furiosa closed her eyes in a spate of red light and shadow. “I had a crew. A decent crew, for once. I wanted them alive. If you wanted anything decent out of Organic himself, you paid him off. That was what I did. Nothing personal. Like the deal I tried to make with the Rock Riders.”

Max sputtered, “Deals are everything in the Wasteland. Deals are who you are.”

“That’s why I have to think – I’m here dealing for the Citadel. This place is full of traps. They weave the law to suit them. The Arbiter picked me apart like a salvage engine tonight. It’s everything I have to try and stay ahead of them. I’m not doing well if I’ve got a death duel tomorrow. Organic’s set up, he isn’t going anywhere?”

“Not the point. You had your revenge on the Immortan. I helped you. I need mine.”

Furiosa had half-risen now and was holding her one hand out to him. “Two days and I can. What if I build it into the negotiations –“

Trapped in rage and memory, he said, “You’d tell Gastown what he did to me? He touched me more than you have.”

She made a noise of horror and pulled her hand back. “I would never. Never.” She rallied. “Two days! There’s thousands of people on each side of this deal, the Citadel and Gastown.”

“War Boys and Gastown schlangers. All of them after my blood.” He saw her press against the balcony grid, away from him, not touching him now that he’d reminded her how unclean he was.

Her voice was hollow. “I waited seven thousand days for my revenge. Couldn’t see my way to it, for most of them. Hated it like you do now. I know the pain.”

“You don’t. Can’t.” His first fevered thought was that Organic had valued her enough to keep her whole, never broken her down for parts. Then, that anyone understanding was impossible. Unthinkable. If they truly did understand, if they knew his shame, he’d have to kill them.

She peeled herself off the metal. “Max. Breathe. I need you.” She was reaching for him again, naming him, too late.

“You’re wrong,” he snarled. “You think like that – talk like them– you don’t need me at all.” He swung himself up and down onto the ladder.

Hammering down it heedlessly, his knee cried out, the pain reaching up to his aching chest for a circuit of fire. Another toxic billow of emissions caught him in the throat. Memory took him. He was in the Citadel’s darkness again, broken and gagged, ten War Boys holding him down while Organic, laughing, pierced his neck vein with a cannula. Only the slice of gridded metal against his hands recalled him to where he was, swaying on a ladder high enough for a killing fall. He managed to make it down.

At the bottom, eyes burning, face streaked and contorted, he reached for the bottle of clean water the History Man had given him.

But it was gone.


	7. Restless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Furiosa contemplates her woes and her past, until Cheedo lends a hand. Toast learns about Cheedo’s fears and strengths. And Max receives an offer that a road warrior might not be able to refuse.

Furiosa sprang up as soon as she heard the ladder rattle. By the smoke that blew in to blind her, Gastown itself was ripping Max away. If Max had run into the Wasteland night, he’d be trackable, but anyone could lose themselves in the tangle of Gastown pipes and laneways. As she coughed, eyes stinging, her toe bumped something on the balcony. She looked down. Max had left a full Citadel water bottle behind.

Nobody left water behind, in the Wasteland.

Did he hate the Citadel that much?

Now she had to make that terrible choice again: her duty to the Citadel, or Max. Smoke-grimed and shaking, she dragged herself off the balcony, towards the Citadel team inside.

The officers’ bedroom was empty. In the main room, the History Man was snoring elaborately on something soft and threadbare. The old faker had only started when Furiosa entered. Two War Boys were watching the lift: one gave her the V8 sign and went, silently, to guard the balcony. She muttered, “If Max returns, get me. No matter what time it is.” Then, she retreated to the bunkroom to see if she could salvage some sleep.

This seemed unlikely. Her head ached. Of all the schlangers to survive, it would be the Organic Mechanic. Furiosa tried to count the deaths of the Fury Road – and failed. She cut back to the ones that seemed like they mattered, from the beginning. Miss Giddy. At least six Rock Riders. Angharad. Angharad’s child. Three Vuvalini. Including Valkyrie. She had to lie there and breathe for five minutes before she could think clearly about the present.

For the next vital day, Furiosa had no help in Gastown that wasn’t War Boys, wasn’t too precious to expend, and wasn’t herself. Furiosa totaled what she knew about Organic and reluctantly concluded that the Immortan’s medical man, occasional torturer, and chief Citadel bribe-taker truly could wait. The only one safe to send after Organic immediately was…Max. She suspected that Max wasn’t going to wait.

Max had been obsessed with vengeance, tonight – but did that make him insane? He’d been so angry, it was hard to tell. Furiosa admitted that she knew that anger. It had kept her going for a long, long time. It had been useful when she needed to survive, to fight back, and fuel when it wasn’t so necessary, too. It hadn’t felt crazy, at the time: in her raiding days.

The Arbiter’s knowing words at dinner – _a very successful field Imperator_ – reminded her why she still needed redemption. When she had raided the Wastelands on the Immortan’s behalf, she had been preoccupied with surviving the Citadel and seeing if anywhere was the Green Place. The Wasteland had held little otherwise to stay her half-dead heart, then. Now, Furiosa understood Max’s Wasteland silence, his not giving his name when she had first asked. Nameless, he couldn’t be pinned to whatever he had done, whoever he had been. Unlike her.

With her shoulders burdened by the Citadel, Gastown, and a crew ignorant enough of her past to trust her, Furiosa couldn’t keep her mind from returning to Max. She should have said that the deal with Organic had been who she was then, not who she was now. She should have risked telling him more of herself, sooner, instead of taking refuge in his silence. Should she have tackled him on the balcony, forced him to listen, to follow her orders? No. Not about something this vital. She’d talked him down before, when he still wore Organic’s crude muzzle. Trying again had all gone wrong tonight, driving him back into that haunted wildness. All he had heard was her denial. He’d even heard the withholding she hadn’t mentioned.

Sparring against Max with shared passion and violence was one thing. The urge opened in her by Max’s invitation to take Organic down – that was a Gastown pit of black mire, waiting to trap her. She was guarding her redemption by keeping it untapped.

A soft touch on Furiosa’s shoulder made her jerk. She flinched from a long, dark fall of hair, barely stopping herself from saying aloud, _Val?_

Instead, Furiosa heard Cheedo’s young whisper. “You’re doing the breathing thing again.”

“Sorry.” Gastown fumes hadn’t helped. She adjusted to lie on her back, as the healer had told her to do.

“I’m going to get you some tea.” Furiosa heard Cheedo rustle in her dress pockets and scuffle softly off. The door opened and closed. Furiosa’s thoughts turned further.

What the Citadel needed could be done without Max. Imperator Furiosa could replace Max with other scouts. Would be a warlord the Wasteland would regret, if they pushed the Citadel. Was hard enough, used to silence – or she had been.

But the woman who hadn’t given her name to Max, either, remembered a green place. She had survived being that earlier Imperator to emerge fierce, warped off true, yet alive. She didn’t want to live without the freedom she had known with Max, brief and sustaining. The desire. The unspoken love. She lay there caught between her named self and her unnamed one, feeling her chest ache, like her heart was wrapped in coils of searing wire.

Cheedo stepped back in and knelt silently at the level of Furiosa’s bunk. Furiosa reached out and found a cup that wasn’t too hot. It smelled of sage, and something floral and bitter.

“It’ll help you sleep. I can take the cup when you’re done?”

Like anything could make her sleep, tonight. She sculled it and thrust the cup towards Cheedo’s voice. Mercifully, Cheedo tiptoed off to put the cup somewhere.

The small kindness in the dark smoothed Furiosa out. She closed her eyes. After a quiet moment, her twisted thoughts smoothed and simplified.

_I can’t wipe out the Citadel’s darkness fast enough. The deals, the deaths are catching up. The Wasteland doesn’t forget, and silence is no shelter._

_I’ve traitored him. After he gave me everything._

_I had. I’m losing._

_A chance at redemption, and…_

_Max…_

Furiosa curled her only fist over her heart and closed her heavy eyes.

* * *

Toast had woken up too early, thinking. Trying to find a way that Furiosa wouldn’t be fighting the Rock Rider. No matter how she shuffled events in her mind, she couldn’t find a way to fix it by the time they were in Gastown. Something would have had to change earlier…in the canyon, or even before that. If Furiosa had told the Rock Riders there would be people with her, they could have helped unhook the pod, or the Rock Riders would have known to blow the canyon right away. She heard Furiosa murmur from the bunk one down and one over, and opened her eyes.

Based on the light around the edge of the door, it was scarcely dawn. Cheedo was standing by Furiosa, and looked up right into Toast’s face with a finger held up for silence. She gestured at the door. Carefully, Toast slid out and down, taking the blanket to wrap around her. Cheedo took a blanket off an unused pallet herself.

When they went out, Cheedo closed the door, wrapped herself, and sat down immediately in front of it. “Furiosa wasn’t sleeping. So I got her some tea,” Cheedo said.

Toast had to smile as she joined her. “You’re so nice.”

Cheedo looked straight ahead and whispered, “If Melita in the Infirmary is right, she’ll be asleep for a quarter of a day. Don’t tell her it was the tea.”

Toast was speechless.

In a fierce hiss, Cheedo said, “She has to sleep! She has to be good for today and tonight.”

Toast couldn’t deny this. “What was she saying?”

“She was falling asleep. It was all mixed up. Something about the Wasteland and names and cholera. Melita said she’d worry and work too hard.”

“You’re working hard if you’re up this early. How are you holding up? You were talking for the Citadel, what, three times yesterday?” Toast asked.

Cheedo shook her head. “It gets easier every time I do it. Talking to Ace in the truck, then the welcome, then the dinner yesterday. Do I need to rhyme, like the Arbiter does sometimes?”

Toast said, firmly, “No. I don’t like the rhyming. It’s pretentious, not Citadel. Wait, what about Ace in the truck?”

Cheedo leaned against her to whisper, “I didn’t like sitting next to him.”

Toast was startled. “He’s Furiosa’s second among the War Boys. He knows a lot and he talks to me like I’m a person, not a goddess come downstairs from the Green.”

“No, it’s just…the War Boys are our age. Mostly. The Ace is so _tall_ and he’s _old_ and he’s got that steel _tooth_ and he always wears the sunglasses so I can’t see his eyes. He took off that vest and he’s so _naked_ without any body mods. The Immortan didn’t have any, either. Remember?”

Toast felt chilled at what Cheedo had hidden so well. “I’ll sit next to him coming back.”

Cheedo shrugged. “I’ve talked to him. I’m okay now.”

“Truly?” When Cheedo nodded with a small but real smile, Toast said, “I guess the History Man got all the mods for old people and there weren’t any left for Ace.” They both smiled.

“You really don’t mind the talking or having everyone looking at you?” Toast thought that was the worst part of being here. She could feel the eyes on her, like hands. Laying in her bunk, thinking, Toast had decided that everyone went masked in Gastown because that was the only way to have privacy, among the flimsy buildings, shanties, and grids of pipes.

But Cheedo shook her head again. “It’s the opposite of the Vault, where nobody saw us but we were touched all the time. Everyone is seeing me, and they can’t touch me – when I was giving the greetings, they were all waiting to see what I did. Even the creepy Arbiter and their war lord. I feel like, hm, like I’m the whole Citadel, when I’m doing it.”

Toast eyed Cheedo with new respect. “Are you – do you mind Nek’Minute?”

“Nek’Minute isn’t too tall. He moves like he likes dancing. Do you like him? Like Capable liked Nux?”

Toast stiffened. “Why would I like him?”

“You talked to him instead of Lookout all dinner.”

“Lookout’s dumber than a rock. He didn’t say a thing to me. Nek’Minute liked to hear himself talk. More than he likes to hear himself think – he shouldn’t have told me so much.”

“Maybe Lookout wanted to talk. I thought only women could be beautiful. But he’s beautiful.” Toast looked sharply at Cheedo, who blushed. “You don’t like either of them?”

Toast looked down. “Maybe I just like guns. I don’t look at anybody like that.”

Cheedo was still blushing. “I can look! Remember when the Dag and I were new in the Vault and the Dag got in so much trouble for just looking at the War Boys?”

“I do,” said Toast. “But it wasn’t the worst thing that happened in there.”

Cheedo said, “I don’t want to do anything. Just to look and go back and tell the Dag stories.” Toast softened. Cheedo’s playfulness, her energy, her owning her gaze and voice – this was why they’d taken the chance to flee the Vault. Capable’s entanglement with that War Boy who’d died had been sadder and more complicated, but what Capable had wanted, at the time. Toast, herself, was relieved to shrug, and not care, and to be free of it all.

They wouldn’t be alive and free without Furiosa. Toast had thought that Furiosa was like her. She’d corrected that after how Furiosa and Max were staring at each other, these few days. Cheedo’s glances at passable Gastown boys had nothing on those two. They both had the same expression Furiosa had worn in the Vault, the day before she’d said she would take them to the Green Place. Faces full of secrets, looking at and through each other, into some space of wildness or rescue.

Toast recognized, more than the other Sisters, how separate Furiosa had held herself from them, and for how long. Since the Fury Road, Furiosa had treated them the most like equals of any of the older generation at the Citadel – the Ace had taken his cues from her. The way Furiosa asked Toast to help had taken shape when she’d been introduced as Furiosa’s aide here in Gastown. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it, when she compared herself to the Ace. Still, Toast rubbed her tattooed left arm under her sleeve, thinking of her memorial names written there, unhappy to think of adding Furiosa’s to the list. The deaths of the Fury Road were the cost of Cheedo and herself getting their lives back. Furiosa was the one paying the price.

Her gesture made Cheedo ask, “Can I look at the names on your arm?” Toast rolled her sleeve back. Unexpectedly, Cheedo pressed one finger against Miss Giddy’s name. “What was it she used to say to us, in the Vault?”

Toast said, mildly for her, “She said a lot, all the time.”

“The one about the vehicle. And being our age?”

Toast did her best to mimic their lost teacher's dry, refined voice, speaking of the lost luxuries of the Before-time. “When I was your age, I had freedom. I went where I liked and saw who I liked. I had a car, I had Tinder, and yes, there were boys. Most importantly, my body was my own. I cannot give you that freedom, but I want you to know you deserve it.”

“Yes. Nobody stopped her from looking.” Cheedo sat upright. “Remember, she said it once in front of Furiosa, and Furiosa got so agitated because Miss Giddy used to drive her own vehicle?” They both leaned against each other, Toast smiling as she felt Cheedo laugh at the memory.

Cheedo stopped, suddenly. “I wish so much Miss Giddy wasn’t dead. Wherever she died. And I really hope Furiosa doesn’t die tonight.”

Toast slid her left arm around Cheedo’s waist. “Me, too.” They rested against each other.

* * *

Max had hurtled through Gastown until he had to stop, disoriented. He had been pursued by a repeated vision, not of the girl-ghost Glory, but of Glory’s nameless mother. He’d first met her in Gastown through the grid of pipes, and that was how she tormented him now. Her vision hissed, _You helped them – not us. You return to them – we weren’t enough!_ Other hands reached for him through the grid, whether ghosts or real, he never knew. He had fled. When he was aware of himself again, he was walking a rut into the parking lot’s gravel beside his car, shivering.

He frowned at his memories. Glory’s mother had forced two blood debts on him to get him to help her daughter. Only when he’d delivered had she said he was all right, he could stick around. Her scathing words about other road warriors took the appeal out of her saving his life twice. He’d turned away from her, not wanting to be manipulated – and her death, and the death of her brave, heartbreaking daughter, had followed minutes later. He’d paid that debt many times over, since.

Furiosa had owed him nothing when she offered him what he needed on the Fury Road – a free face and a ride away from the Citadel. In hindsight, she could have stabbed him anytime with her gearshift knife. She had either trusted or needed him, one of the two, and it had taken them further than he’d ever imagined. Which was why her withholding tonight, asking him to hold back on Organic, had turned him into a void of shame and rage.

Despite this betrayal, he still ached for Furiosa. When he’d felt like he hadn’t deserved her attentions before, he’d fixed it with … actions. Showing up with what she needed, a plan or a person. Now, as the peak of the Citadel, Furiosa didn’t need anything. Least of all his battered, used body, when she’d been reminded of where he’d been.

Flashbacks shuttered behind his eyes again. Not the faces he couldn’t help, but the faces he had seen as he suffered as a blood bag. He was the ghost. And he wouldn’t be alive again until he took care of Organic. Max gritted his teeth. Yes. Organic’s blood, and that alone, would wash away his renewed sense of filth. Then he could start over.

Mad as he was for revenge, he recognized Furiosa’s warning about Gastown law. If he wanted to drive (he _needed_ to drive) that took guzzoline. If he pissed off Gastown, guzzoline got a lot harder for a road warrior. Close to impossible. He took up his pacing again, combing what he knew for possible loopholes.

Across the parking lot, the night contracted into shadows. Day was beginning. Max paused at the sound of heavy boots crunching slow across the parking lot’s gravel. Several people, some weighed down, taking time to look around. Carefully, he stepped back to his car, waiting, braced for trouble.

One of the silent Gastown enforcers paced down the parking lot’s aisle, followed by a figure robed in gray, another enforcer behind. Gimlet blue eyes locked onto Max. “I like a man who’s up early in the morning,” said the Arbiter.

The enforcers stood back, flamethrowers down, as the Arbiter approached Max. “It’s said you’ve been trading salvage to the Citadel.”

Max shrugged.

“And, based on your market deal for a Citadel drink tonight, picked up a taste for the best. There’s no need to waste yourself on petty services.”

Max gave his head a slight tilt.

“You’ve always been an honorable man, by the law of the Thunderdome. I praised you once for doing Gastown a favor, killing a Wasteland terror. Perhaps you’d do the same again, if it was worth your while?”

Max allowed a word. “Who?”

“Imperator Furiosa.”

Max stayed absolutely silent.

“I understand. The Citadel is a valuable trade contact – I’m aware it’s your dealings that give you the chance of getting close to them. You’ll lose nothing by it. Gastown would give you preferred trader status. Including goods we usually keep to ourselves. Besides that, our assassin’s fee is unmatchable: guzzoline whenever you ask, as long as you live and drive.”

Max gave his head a shake, even as he leaned back into the brushed-steel car behind him.

“Yes, it can be done. I am the law, and my word is Gastown’s bond.” Thinking he needed persuasion, the Arbiter spoke on. “The Imperator is a rising warlord. She betrayed the Immortan – and the Wasteland only knows who else. Now, she brings the spectacle of a duelling death to seduce Gastown. When I offered her an alternative! For the sake of peace on our roads, I repeat: a lifetime of guzzoline for the body of Furiosa.”

Max’s doubts went down like they’d been hit by a flamethrower. His mind cleared, at last.

He knew what to do.

“Got my own business first, today.” Max looked the Arbiter in the eye. “When do you want it done?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the _Mad Max: Fury Road_ comic set in Gastown, two years prior to this story, the nameless character the Arbiter is based on attempts to recruit Max for Gastown. Good help and Thunderdome survivors are hard to find!


	8. Hot Zones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wordburger: It's business time! Gastown breaks up the Citadel negotiators. Toast learns the depths of the People Eater’s past depravity, and wonders if it’s up to her to make it right. Meanwhile, Furiosa weighs the value of a backslide from her own redemption.  
> *  
> *  
> EXTRA WARNINGS for discussions of sexual slavery, mutilation, and military violence.

It had taken until midday for the entire Citadel party to wake up: they were all on Gastown hours, now. Then, the Citadel negotiators had been split. The History Man had been whisked off to view the oil and guzz refining works. The Ace had been invited to view Gastown’s Polecat training (something Toast was happy to miss). As for Furiosa, Cheedo, and Toast, they had been escorted to a room that made the Vault look as crude as the Citadel’s supply depot: the Jade’s private quarters. No War Boys had been allowed with them. “Surely, we trust each other, now,” the Jade had said.

Toast looked around the tea table, uncomfortably. In the Jade’s main room, dark draperies covered most of the windows and walls – there was no knowing how many doors were concealed behind and about them. They were all perched uncomfortably on a low suite of pale leather furniture, around an even lower mirrored table. The Jade, veiled in white today, hands covered in flashing white jewels, had personally offered them tea, tiny bits of food so sweet they made Toast’s teeth ache, and preliminary trade talks.

These were going well, considering that Furiosa and the Jade seemed to dislike each other equally. Furiosa was terse and grim; the Jade slid an undertone into her twining words. Toast understood Furiosa’s attitude to the woman who had, voluntarily, become the People Eater’s mistress for years and years. Perplexingly, the Jade was treating Furiosa as if she had done something just as distasteful.

The Jade was summing up their hour’s discussion. “We agree: the Citadel will reduce their guzzoline acquisition by fifteen percent and their non-guzz chem by thirty percent. Gastown reduces our produce tally in response, including no more Mother’s Milk products. The complementary reduction in high-value items makes this manageable. Here in Gastown, we had a slight population drop after your road war, Imperator. The Amnesty always brings us some new migrants. If we in Gastown are anything, we are intelligent, and we are looking towards our own needs. I’ll show you something we are growing here ourselves. We had it at dinner last night.” She rang a small bell.

The servitor who had brought them tea and sweets returned. He was as amazing to see as Lookout, in a different way: an older boy or an extremely young man, slim, shirtless, with a fine-cut face, a creamy complexion, and tumbled blonde hair only just starting to darken. He carried a box under a black drape. With silent disdain, he placed it on the table, took the bell, and stood to one side. Toast eyed his snake-skinny hips and thought he had been at the dinner the night before, masked and serving. She moved to the edge of her seat, her hand on her pistol-weighted pocket.

The Jade whisked the drape away from the box to reveal two little animals, sleek and brown as Wasteland shadows. Inside a light cage, they moved around each other like a silken dream. Toast gasped. She hadn’t seen a live animal since she had been taken by the Citadel. The other treasures in the room were nothing compared to them. She couldn’t look at anything else, slaking a thirst she hadn’t known she had. Cheedo was even more smitten, leaning forwards with her hands together. “Mice!”

“Rats,” said the Jade, sounding pleased. “We cannot grow plants here, but we can grow these.”

Furiosa said, “Protein,” with a note of approval.

The Jade inclined her head, lowering her heavy eyelashes. “An excellent return on the investment of our scraps and spare insects. I hope that, in a few years, these will be next to the crickets at every food stall here.” She flashed her hazel eyes at Furiosa. “Then we can cease using the expedient protein sources that gave the Immortan’s former accountant his name. We all have our compromises – don’t we, Imperator?”

The sound of the small bell tinkled through the air, just as the doorway’s curtains shifted. “I believe the Imperator’s presence is required now for the talk of war games. Toast, Cheedo, I invite you both to remain, for a time. There’s much more I can tell you about what makes Gastown work.”

Furiosa glanced at the one entryway they knew about, hungrily. Cheedo said, “If I can help here?” Toast groaned, internally. Now she would be stuck here, too, instead of at the military meeting. She said to Furiosa, “I guess you’ll fill me in later.”

“Yes,” Furiosa said, putting down her teacup with a rattle and standing. To the Jade, she said, “Thank you for the drink. We’ll formalize the new trade deal tomorrow.” Toast caught Cheedo’s eye and they both relaxed. The leaders disliked each other, but they were able to do what they had to. Toast decided that, if she was stuck here, it was her job to learn as much as she could.

Toast heard the sound of extra doors closing – ones she hadn’t heard before. The Jade broke her luxurious lounging to lean forwards and pour more tea. “Your Imperator is nearly as formidable as the last Warlord the Citadel sent to Gastown. The Immortan’s son, Scabrous Scrotus. Did you know much about him?” Toast felt a chill. Furiosa given her a dark word of warning about Scabrous. _Never speak of him unless somebody else does._

Toast took a hard breath and chose her approach. “I heard that outside this area, others avoided Gastown because of him. That he was so crazy, such a killer, the Immortan wanted him as far away as possible.”

The Jade replied, “Yes. Precisely. With him as a predecessor, for all your talk of a Council, none of us here have been sure that the Citadel’s talk was not a mere veneer over Furiosa’s power.” She gave Toast an expectant look.

“The Citadel Council is real,” said Toast, firmly. “Us former Wives are on it. They talk about everything from every side, trying to do the right thing.”

“It’s so boring,” Cheedo added.

“No, it’s not!” said Toast. “Some Citadel representative you are. We try to make sure we all understand everything.”

Cheedo sat up defiantly. “I like the plant parts and the medicine parts, not the scheduling, and when Corpus and the History Man argue for hours.”

“I’d rather have them argue in front of us, so that we learn, instead of keeping it behind closed doors.”

The Jade was laughing, quietly, like Cheedo often did. “All right, I believe you. And I respect that Furiosa kept her bargain with you: power for your part in her revolution.”

“No, we – “ Cheedo began.

Toast interrupted, fast. “Would you have made that bargain with Furiosa, in your Vault days?”

“Oh, my, yes!” the Jade laughed. “I thought I might get it through being the Immortan’s favorite. But, no. I had to do it the hard way, these twenty oldyears here.”

“What’s your story?” Toast asked.

“The day the Immortan said I was out, I stormed off the Treadmill and shouted at the next set of drivers to take me to Gastown, promising them a bounty. They were well paid. The People Eater had been waiting for a former Wife like myself, who came to Gastown of her own accord.”

Cheedo looked perplexed. “Why did the People Eater need somebody who wanted to be here? The Immortan just said you were a Wife and that was it. You were.”

Toast had an idea, but she wanted to hear the Jade’s response to Cheedo’s innocence. Finally, the Jade managed, “He was an indolent man. He wanted things done. That takes a certain complicity. I drove a hard bargain with him.” Toast shuddered. Occasionally, the Immortan had been like that, and it had been even worse than usual. You couldn’t shut it out – you were there.

“Did you miss your friends from the Vault?” Cheedo asked.

“I was the Immortan’s favorite. And a favorite has no friends,” the Jade replied. Cheedo and Toast exchanged a look. Angharad had been the Immortan’s favorite, and she’d gotten along with everybody. “It wasn’t long before I had the People Eater twined around one of my fingers, too. He brought me tribute, flaunted me at the Gastown Thunderdome, I had rights of approval over his other amusements. He wasn’t a well man, always, and I helped. And oversaw. And learned. My grasping amused him, then became useful. Eventually, I received legal status as his proxy.”

“I expected some other young beauty to hear how I was indulged, and come to supplant me, but it never happened. Even so, I was dismayed when he turned his attention to a youth brought in by the slavers. A few years younger than you, Cheedo, at the time.” The Jade gestured back at the young servitor. Toast’s heart sank. His beauty, his bitterness, and his trusted status all came together awfully.

“I protested – I, supplanted by a mere child! The People Eater was furious with me. I was handed over to Scabrous for a week.” Cheedo and Toast both gasped in horror.

The Jade stroked her rings. “When I had recovered, somewhat, I found that the People Eater had had the youngster’s tongue cut out, in my absence. So he could never tell anyone what passed between them.”

“Myself, I have stayed veiled ever since.”

After a moment’s heavy quiet, the Jade went on. “The People Eater and I reconciled: he knew he had gone too far. And he missed me. Who else could he talk to?” The note of pride returned to her voice. “I retained my powers. Reconciling allowed me to look after...” She glanced at the young man. “He’s been called Silence. He was paraded about as I had been – but it was no triumph, for him.” The young man nodded, once.

Toast hoped her feelings didn’t show. The Jade thought her tale was a story of passion and success, at first, but that was wrong. The People Eater had been as bad as the Immortan. No, he’d found ways to be worse, unbelievably, and the Jade had learned it too late. Toast recalled Miss Giddy, in the Vault, quietly reminding them all, with an eye on Angharad, that the Vault wasn’t normal. That the way the Immortan treated them wasn’t love. Miss Giddy had quietly joined them. When she could have tried to set herself apart, like this woman, for privilege and authority, and set them up for a fall like the Jade’s.

“You said when we met, Miss Cheedo, that you work with the Citadel’s healers now?” Cheedo murmured agreement. “Could you do us the favour of looking over Silence and seeing what might be done?”

“If…if he doesn’t mind?” The young man had dropped his bitter expression. He walked over to a corner at the far end of the room and opened a drapery corner, letting in some light. Cheedo tiptoed across the carpets. Toast was left with the Jade.

One wall in the main room had been converted to shelving and bars that held an unimaginable fortune of paper, metal, and fabric salvage. “I’d like to show you something, too.” The Jade rose and went to a small, exquisite desk in the middle of the treasury wall. “As you wisely asked, Knowing, had I been offered power by an Imperator, I would have taken it with both hands. I wouldn’t have asked questions, when I was young. But if you are to be a power yourself, you ought to know another reason I was wary of Furiosa.”

The Jade opened a cannibal vellum ledger. It had long, narrow pages. “The People Eater kept accounts of every leaf and cricket eaten, every bullet used, in all the years of the Triumverate. Here are the tallies for Furiosa’s unit, when she was a field imperator. Raiding settlements and feral caravans, bringing down rebels and escapees on behalf of the Immortan.”

Toast let her fingers hover over the lists of weapons and supplies without touching the vellum. She’d been making a study of defense. Looking at what Furiosa had commanded, she saw the blood and fire of war. There was nothing there she didn’t recognize – not even the napalm. She felt sick. Being taken in a raid, despite her attempts to fight, had been the terrible start of Toast’s path to the Citadel. Furiosa had said she’d been taken in a raid, too. Then…how could she?

The Jade saw where her finger had paused, over the napalm entries. “Her armorer stopped requisitioning that suddenly – I suspect a reprimand. Soon after that Furiosa moved up in the Citadel hierarchy. Having earned her place there, as the terror of the Wasteland.”

“The Immortan always feared that one of his Imperators would backstab him. That’s what Furiosa’s ascent seemed like from here. You see my concern?” Toast nodded, slowly. She had once asked Miss Giddy if Furiosa had shared any of her story, in the marches of the Vault nights. Miss Giddy had said, “Some history, even I don’t need to know.” Now she understood, and wished that she didn’t.

Toast looked the Jade in the eye. “There’s no plans for any more of this. None.”

The Jade lifted a hand. “Wait until they’re done with the military talks. All I care about is that Furiosa has no plans to lift her steel hand against Gastown. I allowed some trust because she is a woman, and now I know she deals cleanly.” It was close to what Furiosa, herself, had said about her fight with the Rock Rider.

She lowered her voice. “Since your Fury Road, I’ve learned how few are worthy, here. Especially men. I have fought, and won, with the weapons I have – but I will not make the Triumverate’s mistakes. I must own my decline before it happens. Do you understand me?” Toast looked at her concealing veils, hiding who knew what illness or scars, and could.

“You are young, and knowing, and strong enough to keep up with the Imperator. If she changes her mind about her bargains with you – or if the Citadel is not as green as it seems – I offer you the same bargain here, and more.”

“You want me for Gastown?” asked Toast.

The Jade said, “At the Executive level. What would please you? Assurances of your freedom? Salvage from the Before-time? Vehicles? Tinder and fire from our armory? War Boys to command?”

She couldn’t help but ask, “What’s in it for you?”

“Call it consolidation. And I like to think of winning a long game against the Arbiter...”

Toast glanced over to Cheedo and Silence. With Cheedo, he had unbent enough to bring the rat cage over, and she had both the little animals sniffing around her lap. Toast wondered if Furiosa’s tally was worth it for the sake of one renewing life like Cheedo. She was the best of survivors, trying to console the shattered young man. He was worse off than any of the former Vault inmates, even the Dag, assaulted and pregnant by their jailer.

Or the Jade, still justifying men’s abuses.

Or Furiosa, who had sought Toast didn’t know what as a raider, instead of the raided.

Offered anything she wanted, Toast felt it dawning that it wasn’t power, but to make a difference. She thought about Silence, and the Rock Rider, and the few Gastown women, almost all wearing mismatched shoes and paired up for safety. The beggars, the burning water, the stinking air. The Citadel had Furiosa, if she lived through her duel, which looked more and more likely. It had the Ace and the History Man and her Sisters and the Council.

It didn’t need a difference half as much as Gastown did.

* * *

The military negotiators were meeting in the Establishment penthouse again. Furiosa was relieved by the airiness, after the Jade’s suffocating nest. She had woken up late, dull and heavy-hearted, aware that if she’d slept so long, Max hadn’t returned, when she had a duel to the death in ten hours. Then, meeting with the Jade had reminded her of the worst time in her life: her period in the Vault, and the five hundred days afterwards. She pushed back to the present.

The Jade definitely preferred the Sisters to herself. The feeling was mutual. Furiosa felt that with her out of the way, between Cheedo’s charm and Toast’s knowing, the Sisters would come back with something valuable.

The penthouse was stripped down today, a box in the air between the ochre Wasteland and the hazy sky. The long table was bare, save for a few maps that the Bullet Farm Captain’s young aide, Lookout, was setting out. He watched her emerge from the creaking lift and gave her the V8 sign, clumsily.

She responded with a nod and stepped up to the table to preview the maps. While she did, Lookout fumbled with some of his bullets. Furiosa, used to pups and young War Boys, waited. Finally, he stammered, “The Wives. They’re good now?”

Furiosa gave him the look she used to chill presumption in those same youngsters. “Why is this your business?”

He surprised her. “My ma was a Wife, a long time ago. She said it was hard. It didn’t use to be safe to tell people. I, I thought it might be, now.”

“Your mother was a former Wife of the Immortan.” She wasn’t questioning it. He looked like what he was, the son of a full-life beauty and a man strong enough to defend her. Whatever had gone between his parents, he was the sort who’d ask if another person was all right.

He said, “It was six thou’five days ago. She made it to the Bullet Farm. My pa – my pa who’s dead - said she and he scarred her face together to hide her. So other people would leave her alone.” He swallowed. “She was still beautiful.”

“Did your father die on the Fury Road?” Furiosa asked.

“No. He did defense on supply runs, then worked in the plating plant with Ma. They died when they were old. More than fourteen thousand days,” he said, proudly.

That was close to her own age. It was, like the Jade’s ghastly choice, yet another life she could have had. With a final note, she said to the boy, “They’re good now. They do what they like. Ask them.” He bowed his head and gave her a more confident V8.

Nek’Minute arrived with his half-leaping stride, followed more sedately by the Ace, Munted, and a blended handful of Gastown and Citadel War Boys. They bantered back and forth amongst themselves about the Polecats. The Bullet Farm’s Captain arrived last. There were handshakes all around, and they settled about the table. Furiosa took the seat next to the Ace and told the most senior Citadel War Boy to sit next to her. For the first time at a Gastown table, nobody present was goading or encircling her with words. The sunlight and the straightforward military men created a comfortable zone.

The Captain took the seat opposite her. Furiosa took the chance to say, “Got a good aide there, Captain.”

His pouchy face puckered slightly in a possible smile. “Pleased to hear it. Do you want to be the chair today, Imperator?” he asked, with deference. Furiosa shook her head. The Captain said, “Been an admin man most of my time, and us Bullets have been here two days already. I’ll proceed?” Gratifyingly, he waited for Furiosa’s nod before beginning.

“’The Bullet Farm, the Citadel, and Gastown have had mutual defense arrangements. Your recent coup put you on the opposite side of that. You showed the war party model’s inefficiencies. We’ve all had our vehicles and fighters cut back as a result. Need to work smarter with what we have. As a startpoint, how’s this. More checkposts; more signalling; and more information about your agreements with the Rock Riders?”

Furiosa made an agreeing noise, as did the Ace.

The Captain looked relieved, and pulled close a map of the region. Furiosa’s first instinct was to want a copy of that map for Max – then she remembered, and her heart chilled. “Right now, there’s only three security threats for a hundred klicks. The first is here.” He pointed at the map, to a point close to those hundred clicks away, along the Broken Coast. “Wildcatters – some scavengers have banded together to drill oil themselves, where it’s easy to get to. They burn it down to get basic guzz.”

“Gastown competition!” Nek’Minute huffed. “Can’t have that.”

The Captain pointed again, to the east, closer. “The second one is the new home of some indentured staff who took off from the Bullet Farm and Gastown recently. While affairs were reorganizing.”

“Set up around some culty bloke what talks about water all the time,” Munted groused. “Could mop them up right quick.”

The Captain tapped the map a third time at a point familiar to Furiosa from the recent road war. “Speaking of cults. The third one is the base of a new cult called the Sun Touchers. Sounds Vallhalla-esque. I think they’re Citadel strays, frankly.”

Furiosa and the Ace exchanged a look. They’d noticed a lack Fury Road survivors showing up at the Citadel. “Still worshipping Immortan Joe?” asked Furiosa.

“No. They’ve stepped it up a level. Direct to the atom bomb,” said the Captain, drily.

Munted said, “We thought they was just blowhards. Yesterday, like, the guards turned some salvagers away. Their Geiger was too high to let ‘em in. They was right pissed off and told us why. Turns out Sun Touchers are trying to get hot zone salvage. The hotter, the better.” Everyone at the table knew what a hot zone was: since the end of the world, it was a region destroyed by a nuclear strike.

Furiosa leaned forward. “Why?”

“I don’t think we want to find out,” growled the Captain.

“Dirty bombs, I say,” said Nek’Minute. “Fill them up with the stuff that glows in the dark, then something to blow. Makes a half-life of anyone nearby.” He spread his hands and vibrated his fingers, evocatively.

Furiosa felt herself shed the last of the morning’s grim numbness. Every muscle lit awake at the thought of Citadel runaways with too much knowledge, a heavy grudge, and the Immortan’s madness. Images flickered through her: the Wretched building in the Citadel’s courtyard, the Citadel’s green gardens, the cool of the pure water Wellhead at the Citadel’s heart. She did her best to stay collected. “Escaped slaves aren’t our business, and those wildcatters are far away. The Sun Touchers are the real trouble,” said Furiosa. “We need to take them out. Now. Yesterday. Can you block them from the Amnesty?”

“Don’t block nobody from the Amnesty, that’s the whole point of it,” said Munted. “Our guards are on the hot stuff, no fear.”

“When the Amnesty’s done, we’ll help you all we can.” Nek’Minute added, “I speak for Gastown: you want us at your back – you help us with ours, too.” He smiled, irrepressible. “Love to have my own Tell about raiding with the new Imperator! That big raid, twenty-five-thou’ days back, Last Free? That was yours?”

“Last Tree, it was. Last Tree Station,” Furiosa corrected.

Nek’Minute lit up. “That was my mentor’s last raid! He said it was chrome.” He turned, taking in the whole table. “These settlement scavs were trying to blow a Gastown well, snipe us off with their rifles. Wasn’t like they were drilling for oil on the land themselves. You rounded them all back in for a three-day siege. They wouldn’t give up, and you showed them –  with your supplies low and half your Boys in Valhalla. Your troop got in close and broke them, burned them down. They saw the smoke from Gastown!”

Of all the raids to recount with War Boy overexcitement, he’d picked that one. The one where, when it was clear it was the Triumverate or the end, they’d chosen the end. They’d set fire to themselves.

Gastown had been satisfied to see the smoke. Half out of her mind after watching it, when Scabrous had arrived late with backup and supplies, she’d told him the truth – and he’d laughed for an hour. Word had gone back, and up. She’d been deemed ruthless enough for the next step in the Citadel’s hierarchy. Which had led to the Rig, and the Ace, and everything that came after.

The Captain said, with an indulgent edge, “You’re the ones who know what you’re doing in the field. We’ve got every faith you’ll be here to settle on this tomorrow, Imperator.”

Lookout managed to mutter, “Help us out?”

Furiosa looked around the table, glancing last at the Ace, waiting for her response. “Might be worth it,” he said.

She looked again at the Gastown and Bullet Farm men, solid as the Ace compared to the past madmen who’d had their roles, giving her a timely warning. Urging her to join them in violence and politics. Thinking of the Sun Touchers set a twitch in her living arm, a hunger for an absent weapon. The War Boys called it an itchy trigger finger.

It was reassuring. Even isolated in her duty to the Citadel, she still had some sensation besides pain or numbness. That was better than the days after Last Tree – or after watching Max leave, last night.

* * *

Toast and Cheedo had sought refuge back in the Citadel’s rooms. They hadn’t left the Establishment building all day. Cheedo, rattled by her encounter with Silence, was alternately fussing with items in her makeup and saying healer-ish things, like “He has the same tension the Dag did, after that time with the Immortan.” Toast was making listening noises and wondering what the Jade would say if she asked about giving orders to the Polecats. Then Cheedo said, “When do we tell Furiosa all of that?”

Toast exhaled. “I think it’s like last night, when she asked if there was anything that couldn’t wait after the dinner. I don’t think she’s meeting with the Jade again until we are, tomorrow. So, maybe, tomorrow? After the duel?”

“They’re not going to let us go see the duel, I can tell.” Cheedo looked at the guarding, listening War Boys. “Toast, come into the washroom with me. You still have some eye makeup on from yesterday.”

They had just emerged when the elevator pinged. The History Man, Furiosa, the Ace, and their attending War Boys came in.

Toast hopped up. “What’s the news from the military talks?”

“Looks like we’re going to be doing some war,” said the Ace. Toast, feeling stricken (and noting that the Jade’s warning had been accurate) managed to keep her composure. The Ace, with a few asides from Furiosa, told them about the Sun Touchers and Gastown’s raiding proposals. The War Boys all gathered and listened intently.

The History Man proceeded to shock Toast. “I’m glad you’re committed towards the first one. Otherwise I’d be obliged to take off and see what I could do as a sniper.” Toast was further surprised when Furiosa flinched. “I know, I’m a foolish old man, and I can’t shoot down the magpies like I used to. But the Sun Touchers sound that bad.”

“I’m with you, History. They’re a threat and a half,” said the Ace. “If we’re lucky we can reel them back in. Citadel boys, I can talk to ‘em, as a start.”

“You are a good man, Ace, but if they want to bring back the bomb, they are the greatest evil of the Before-time, returning.” He turned to Furiosa. “Is there a way to do this without the other raids? They are the evil of our After-time, pulling down what people manage to build back up.”

Furiosa and the Ace looked at each other. The Ace said, “Not sure yet. If tonight goes all right, we can try tomorrow, right, Boss?” Furiosa made an indefinite noise.

“ _Wordburger: And so it goes._ ”

“How’d you do in the works?” asked the Ace.

“I lasted until the hydrocrackers until I had to tune out. _Wordburger: mad scientists_. They’re bloody lucky Parteger isn’t neurotypical: everything in his head is focused on what the works here need. By the way, they tried to recruit me. It’s rare enough that someone who’s not in their system gets that far inside that they all assumed it was just a matter of time.”

“Is it?” asked Furiosa, wearily.

History snorted. “I’d do what the Wretched call a desert walk first. When you walk out into the Wasteland without any water." The History Man began to pace as he talked. “They’re not running out of oil underground, but that’s the only thing that’s not wrong. Local overdrilling is making what they get harder to refine, but they’re too paranoid to move out and take the risk of drilling further away. Parteger’s not a young man, and it will take four sharp blokes to replace him. Succession problems, finding young people able to be apprentices, are very serious.” Toast squirmed, thinking of the Jade trying to recruit her.

“It’s compounded by the idiots out there who think that possessing Gastown is the same as having an endless supply of fuel. Their focus on defense is leading to neglect of their infrastructure. One good fire or explosion, or sickness amongst the mad scientists, will be as much trouble as what they fear. What’s going to bring this place down in the end is so boring, nobody outside the Refinery thinks about it much: irreplaceable parts. What you call wiretech. That’s only what I can identify. I gave the Citadel a hundred and fifty oldyears? I give Gastown twenty-five.”

“Smeg. They’ll all hightail it to the Citadel when this place blows,” said the Ace.

Toast looked around. “This makes what Max is about to do for us that much more important.”

“Well said. It’s too easy to forget about our fourth goal here – getting Gastown’s support as we scout for a green place and a scrap of a future,” said the History Man.

“Where is Max today, anyway?” asked Toast.

“Probably having a good kip,” said the Ace.

“I hope so,” said the History Man. He took in the War Boys. “If you see him, be civil.”

Furiosa said nothing. Toast noted that, with her duel a few hours away, Max’s name didn’t make Fuirosa warm with a half-smile and a glance full of secrets. Instead, she was shuttered behind the look she’d worn when she first came to guard the Vault: hard and absent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> • _A favorite has no friend_ – An aphorism originally from a Thomas Gray poem.  
> • _Silence_ – Yet another Mad Max: Fury Road comic character – a blonde, short-haired young person, unnamed, nude or close to it, is seen sitting in misery at the People Eater’s feet at the Gastown Thunderdome. I made this individual male thinking that if this was a female, they’d have been shipped off to the Immortan as a Wife.  
>  • _Fifteen thousand days_ – Just over aged 40. That’s a Bullet Farm worker life span for you.  
>  • _Wordburger: And so it goes _– Recurring phrase in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel _Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.___  
>  • Kip – Slang for a nap.
> 
>  
> 
> __  
> _I've reached that fanfic point where I'm writing in a 'verse and two earlier short pieces (WITH WARNINGS FOR VIOLENCE) fold into this one -[The Afterwife](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4097674/chapters/9291208) has Lookout's mother, former wife Lucky Third, on the day she's cast out and finds her way to the Bullet Farm. [Rise and Redemption](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4591761/chapters/10460475), where Furiosa contemplates the things she needs redemption for. There's a lot of fanon (and great fic) where Furiosa meets the Ace early in her in-the-Citadel-War-Boy days, and is mentored/protected... _but what if she hadn't been so lucky?__  
> 


	9. The Deal of a Lifetime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max has an appointment with the Organic Mechanic - and with vengeance. Furiosa prepares for her duel. The Sisters have their own plan.

Max had sent a restless day dozing in Gastown's finest parking lot, trying to sate himself with sleep and the baseline reassurance of being in his car. After tonight, both of these were going to be in short supply.

A whiff of guzzoline and something elusive clung to the seat where he pressed his face. He couldn’t decide if it was a hint of Furiosa’s ride with him, or an echo of the Citadel, carried in by his equipment. Nor could his dreams. He woke up repeatedly, soaked in sweat, swatting back his nightmares as he emerged from them, then forcing himself back down again.

When the afternoon shadows lengthened, he emerged. He rehydrated, and choked down some Citadel rations without tasting them. He'd learned, over the past few saner months, that these animal tasks helped him focus.

When the sun went down, it was time. There were hours before Furiosa’s duel, and the night markets had opened. Max did what he’d told the Arbiter he was there to do: bartered.

Having left the Citadel with a box or two from the Immortan’s private stashes, Max was well equipped. A mediocre dealer at the best of times, he bartered even more badly than usual, eager to shed the tainted goods. In the Wasteland, people changed their clothing so rarely that you could change your identity with a new outfit. The markets didn’t recognize Max’s figure when he was done. He’d added a coarse black robe with a hood, a gray scarf to cover his lower face, and a pair of leather gauntlets. The extra layer was light, but it set him to sweating again.

In between guzzoline-tinged dreams, Max had planned out what he was going to do when he got his hands on the Organic Mechanic. He had a touch of pride that he’d bargained with the Arbiter to get legal amnesty for a death of his own choosing in Gastown, along with the assassin’s fee they’d discussed. Max didn’t know if Organic had a Gastown citizen brand to complicate things after the fact. He wouldn’t be surprised if the schlanger had dodged it. Either way, Max was free and clear. All he had to do was finish his own business with Organic before the Amnesty began. Immediately after the Amnesty fell, Max was doing business for…others.

Max set thought aside to slip into instinct, honing down to a hunter’s obsessed focus. His destination was in one of Gastown's squatter alleyways. Unlike at the prosperous night market, nobody stopped him or gave him much regard. Max’s indelibly memorized destination was a recycled shanty, close to the oil bog shore. Outside, a few signs in clear writing were pinned up, listing Organic’s services under his Gastown name of Joe Sawbones, and what he’d accept as barter. The hour was early for Gastown commerce, and there was already a line. Max joined the line, reaching beneath the robe for a last-minute survey of his weapons.

A man with a bleeding hand wrapped in rags went in. Fifteen minutes later, he came back out looking pale but relieved, his hand neatly wrapped.

Someone with full-body wraps and a full-body tremor went inside. They didn’t come back out. After a half hour, the door opened again.

Two pretty people in mismatched shoes entered. One was definitely a woman: the other, Max quit looking at when they hissed at him, angrily. They were in there for another fifteen minutes. When they came out, one was sneering, “What a sleaze.”

The definitely female one replied, “I don’t care. He’s a schlanger, but he’s right. Can’t get more bred up, so I might as well work through the Amnesty. He says I'll need fourteen days afterwards, at least.”

“Next up! Haul your lumps in, mate.” It was Max’s turn.

Max went through a minute foyer of tattered plastic into Organic’s new place. It was sparse: tarps shielded the hardpacked dirt floor beneath a metal table, two different chairs, and two sets of shelves with medical equipment. A pair of metal bedframes, padded with rags anyhow, were against the left wall. Only the slightest medical smell was discernible over the standard Gastown reek. Max’s nostrils found it, nonetheless, and his brain slid another level down into readiness. He registered the room’s back door, dark and dull.

Organic was standing behind the table, surveying him. His presence was curiously ordinary. He had his trademark greasy shine, his comb-over tufting up. Max’s outfit seemed impenetrable to him. “What’s your offer?”

Max took out a half bottle of vodka, label only slightly faded, and put it on the table.

Organic opened it and sniffed. His brows raised appreciatively. “You, sir, are a Wasteland prince, deserving of the very best. What’s under the hood?”

Max had never talked in front of Organic, he realized. Never. There had been screams, groans, and on more lucid days, muttering, but never true speech. He said, voice low, “Some schlanger fucked my back up.”

Organic shook his head with a tolerant smile. “Is that a euphemism? Bit of rough got too rough? You Gastown mates. Strip down, let me see. Can’t fix what I can’t see.”

Max drew back the hood, pulled off the scarf. After a cursory glance, Organic said, “Ain’t got all day. Trust me, I’ve seen everything.” He turned aside to stash Max’s fee in a low cupboard.

The bastard didn’t even recognize him.

While Organic was turned away, Max unsheathed his sharpest knife. Fast and fluid, he sliced – to cut Organic’s apron and bandolier shoulders. Organic started as his equipment draped away from him. Max grabbed the back of Organic’s belt and pulled him in.

Organic’s feet skidded on the smooth tarps. “The smeg do you want?” He sounded perplexed rather than afraid. 

“What you took from me at the Citadel. Flesh and blood,” Max growled, tucking the knife for a moment. "Remember? The high-octane feral you rigged onto a lancer's post?"

Organic went wild with tension, trying to turn. “You were that blood bag? That wasn’t me! That was the Citadel. I was just doing my _aaaaaaargh!_ "

Max had wrenched Organic’s arms behind him, hard, with plenty of wrist pressure. Max rocked back, changed his angle, and smashed Organic’s front against the metal table. The insubstantial table bounced and smacked Organic on one side of his face again while both he and Max sprawled. Organic had never used force – he had once had War Boys for that – but he was stronger than he looked, after his survival. They grappled on the floor, Organic trying to scramble to one of his supply shelves, Max dragging him back bodily and floor-slamming him again.

Max palmed the small knife, quick as thought, and sent it slashing towards Organic’s face and neck. There was another gargling scream, and red began to spatter on the tarps. Max inhaled, and firmed his left-handed grip on Organic’s wrists. He raised himself onto his knees, feeling no pain, exuberant, and got ready to slam Organic down hard enough to break ribs.

A spray of fire across Max’s ear and neck shocked him. “Leave Joe alone!”

It was a kid, a boy, screaming at him. He took a second to realize that the burning wasn’t fire, but hot water from a bowl that the kid had thrown on him. In his fighting clarity, Max registered his dark curls, his angry tears, a weird surgical repair between his mouth and nose, still sutured. He was wearing a miniature of Organic’s apron. Max could have swatted him through the shanty wall with one hand.

“Ambo! Back off, mate. Get yourself out!” The boy, healing lip curled, stepped back at Organic’s words, but not very far.

Max flung his weight down against Organic again. “The fuck? Who's he?"

"I live here!" the boy shrilled. "You sphincter!"

“He was going to be the next Organic. But I guess he’ll be a street kid again in ten minutes.” Organic coughed, reading Max’s thoughts through his changed body. He began to plead, extracting one arm. “Let me live. Let me live! Just walk out. No enforcers, I promise. I’ll make it worth your while,” he said, digging into a pocket and tossing something on the floor. Max saw a token in rough, recycled aluminium, enameled red and white. “A life credit. They’re not cheap. Show back up here, I treat you or someone you haul in to the max.”

Max cast a fast, twitchy glance around. At the boy, heaving with frightened breath, still standing his ground. At the man, cringing, staring at him, but also starting to reach for something else, unseen. His own strength seamless in combat mode, Max seized Organic again, shook him, and hurled him into one of his shelves of equipment. Organic took the hit badly and things shattered, a satisfying sound. More blood spattered. It wasn’t enough.

Organic moaned and began to back off from the shelf, setting broken glass tinkling. A strong medical smell hit Max’s nostrils. He pulled his pistol at last. “Stay there one minute. One. Fucking. Minute. Or I shoot.” This was his fight, for once in his life, and he was carving out a moment. The boy and the man both froze.

Max snarled with pure rage, realizing its focus had changed. He was seething at Gastown. The place that polluted every deal, every promise, everything. He was trapped here again with a manipulator on one side, a youngster on the other, the Wasteland’s promise of sure death all around.

He could kill. Or roll the Gastown dice, against the chance he needed the deal of a lifetime. A deal for a life.

It still wasn’t good enough.

In his loathing of Gastown, the Arbiter's face flashed across Max's mind. The solution hit him, clean as one of Furiosa’s killing shots. Max changed how he held the pistol, making it clear he was pointing at _both_ of them.

* * *

Toast was pretty sure that the last thing Furiosa wanted, before her duel, was fourteen people fussing over her. With her, the Ace, and the History Man standing back, that still left Cheedo and ten War Boys. The Court at Gastown forbade all weapons from the justice duels: you won or lost with your bare hands. Nobody knew if Furiosa’s prosthetic arm would make it past the Arbiter’s piercing eye onto the Court. The sharpest War Boy had realized boots qualified as clothing, and The War Boys had gone through all their footwear to find and offer Furiosa a pair of heavier boots close to her size.

Furiosa was now sitting down while two War Boys laced her into the boots, and Cheedo touched up her Imperator’s soot. Toast thought it was disturbingly like the elaborate preparations the Immortan used to have, getting into his gear. The History Man was silent, and when a History Person stopped talking, things were bad. The Ace was watching, waiting for a moment.

Toast was the Knowing, but after today, she didn’t know what to think, or what to do. She had so wanted to be Furiosa’s second. Not like this, though. Not with Furiosa’s history of raids for the Immortan shadowing her mind, nor with Furiosa on the edge of the last death of the Fury Road. Toast remembered Furiosa’s raw scream when that Polecat had snatched her, there.

Pathways sprawled before Toast, tangled as the Gastown pipes. Even if Furiosa died tonight, she still had choices. Return to the Citadel and see if she could walk the fine line between being a Furiosa and being an Imperator. Turn towards Gastown, eager to give her power, waiting, unknowing, for change. Back away from the endless deaths, and try to pull the strings of the Wasteland more subtly by taking up the History – with the risk of becoming a human commodity again.

With the heavier boots fastened, Furiosa stood up and gave her foot a stamp. She looked down at the clean gridded mark her foot had left on the grimy carpet and smiled, tightly. “Right. I’m good to go.”

The Ace made his move. “Gonna see sense and take me along, or not?”

“No,” Furiosa snarled. “We went through this! I need you to stay here because you’re my second. Because you can take my place as a warlord. The rest of you, because you’ll be wrapping up negotiations and running the Citadel!”

“If Gastown lets us leave,” said Toast.

The History Man broke his silence. “Remember, Gastown tried to recruit me earlier today. If worst comes to worst, I can stay in exchange for free passage for the rest of you.”

“But you hate it here,” said Cheedo. “You were saying how awful it is.”

“At least there’s plenty of hot water. It’s the least I can do for Sophia Giddy’s students.”

Furiosa looked at him for, Toast was certain, the first time that day. “You. History People. You’re Miss Giddy’s tribe, all right.”

He lifted his head. _“Noli nothis permittere te terere,_ Imperator.”

Furiosa did the round of the War Boys, thanking them with their names. While they drew lots to see which two would accompany Furiosa as legal witnesses, Toast realized that she hadn’t bothered learning their names, herself. It was hard to tell Gearshank from Turbo, and they’d all kept a certain distance. It hit her that if the Ace had taken his cues from Furiosa in how he treated the Sisters, the War Boys must have had orders from the Ace.

The Ace was next. Furiosa took off the crimson scarf she’d been wearing. “The Citadel needs you. I know you’ll negotiate for defense. This’ll make sure they listen. And. Here.” She handed him several knives and a pistol from her pockets and belts.

The Ace sighed. “Already forgave you once. I’ll keep my mad on until you get back, this time.” He punched her shoulder. She handed over a final knife.

Furiosa turned, then extracted one last weapon. She said to Toast, “You’ll negotiate for the…the everything else.” Furiosa held out the blued-steel pistol, thrusting the grip at her. When Toast recovered enough to fold her hand around it, Furiosa managed, “Better way to get it than how I got it.” Toast reeled at the trust and guilt before her, and managed to nod.

Finally, Furiosa peeled off the long, draping leather vest and held it in Cheedo’s direction, saying, roughly, “All that tea. Thanks.” Cheedo tackled her with a hug, startling Furiosa into wrapping her living arm around Cheedo’s shoulder for an instant.

Standing back, Cheedo took the vest as she said, “You’ll have Max, yes?”

Furiosa, completely silent, cupped and then opened her right hand. Everyone else exchanged baffled looks. Only Max, thought Toast, could have made sense of that.

With the two lucky War Boys, Furiosa got into the lift, and lifted her metal hand to them all. The War Boys delivered a V8 salute. As the lift closed on them, its electronic ping sounded especially pathetic.

When they were gone, the History Man said, “Wordburger: All shall love her and despair.”

“Is that from a Tell, History Man?” Cheedo asked, tilting her head.

“A very long old novel.”

“Miss Giddy used to tell us novel-stories when we were sad. I’d love a story while we’re waiting,” said Cheedo, wistfully. “I wish Miss Giddy was here with us. Don’t you wish she’d been at the dinner?”

“She was the last lady of the apocalypse. She would have _owned_ that table.”

While Cheedo played the History Man like Capable played the guitar, Toast was slipping into the room with the balcony, and closing the door. Before the War Boy guard could take his post again, she stepped onto the balcony, closing that door, too.

A moment alone was a relief. Her eyes were hot, and the night air was cooling down. Peering through the smokestacks, Toast could see a lit-up area at the northern edge of Gastown: the old Before-time netball court turned dueling ground. She peered over the balcony’s side. They were higher up than she had expected - but there was the ladder Max had been using. Heart pounding, she leaned over and grabbed it. She only breathed when she had both feet secure. The metal was hard, rough, and greasy after the Gastown smoke and fumes. Toast began to clamber down to make her way to the Court.

She was glad Cheedo had cornered her in the washroom, where they’d worked out this plan. However Toast felt, she and Cheedo had agreed: one of the Sisters had to Witness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers:  
>  _Noli nothis permittere te terere_ – Latin for “Never let the bastards grind you down.” The correct Latin, because History People are the last pedants on earth.  
>  _All shall love her and despair_ A paraphrase of "All shall love me and despair" from _The Fellowship of the Ring,_ J.R.R. Tolkien.


	10. Furiosa's Glory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bereaved Rock Rider and Furiosa have their bare-handed duel to the death, twisted by the Law and the Voice of Gastown. Increased warnings!

Hitting the ground behind the Establishment Tower in the shadows, Toast was promptly ushered to the front of the building by two masked guards. They let her go, but Toast sensed that the news of her departure would be going upstairs – and not to the Citadel people. Instead of taking the main walkway towards the Court, where Furiosa was probably walking, Toast veered left. From her above-ground view of Gastown ten minutes earlier, she figured the pipe lane on that side would get her there just as quickly.

It might have, but it soon turned into a bad idea. This pipe lane had scanty lighting, and none of the vendors or stalls she’d seen on her one other Gastown walk. The few thugs and beggar clusters along here had their own reasons to avoid the crowds. Toast realized she’d gotten too used to the Gastown smell. By the time she began to pull her scarf up over her face, it was too late. She wasn’t going to be allowed to walk as freely as the Citadel men, or even Furiosa. Her skin crawled in warning, and her shoulders tightened in anger.

Toast did her utmost to balance between moving quickly and keeping track of her followers. Some were directly behind her: a few were alongside, sliding through the darkness of the pipe works. Furiosa had warned her and Cheedo that Gastown men might shout dire insults at them. Her followers were still silent, in a disturbing way, with weight of tainted water. She heard feet rattling the metal above her, where pipes crossed the path overhead.

Then, a shadow in the pipes crooned, “Citadel…come out and play…”

Edged laughter spread back behind her. It was beginning.

“Leave me alone!” Toast turned, pulled the blued-steel pistol Furiosa had handed over, and fired a warning shot at the ground.

The pathway was hard, and the bullet ricocheted up. It pinged off two or three pipes while both followers and passers-by shielded their faces and cursed at her. One man yelled, “You trying to start a leak? Spark a fire?” Someone else began to unholster something, and she didn’t want to find out what. She dashed forwards.

A voice ahead of her crowed, “How much did the Immortan pay you as his Wife, bitch?”

Toast whipped around at the sound of a woman’s voice. There was nothing to be gained by holding her tongue. “Not a drop of guzz. That’s why we had to rip his face off!”

The woman, and a few others with her, screamed with laughter. “Gastown style! Gastown style!” one of them chanted. Their hair and half-bare bodies disrupted the shadows where the pipe lane opened and changed. Toast thought of the Rock Riders, funnelling travellers through their canyon.

For five seconds, somebody on the Gastown streets wasn’t her enemy. Toast took a deep breath and ran up to the cluster of women. “Are you going to the Court? To the duel?”

“Who isn’t?”

“Can I walk with you?” Their History Man had pretended to recruit Max as a street guard last night: if she wasn’t alone, she had a chance.

“What’s your offer?” said one.

Another cried, “She’s Citadel, she can help us with our bets!” The cluster agreed, and Toast found herself pulled into their midst. She looked back; her followers had either dispersed or lost interest. The light caught the Gastown brand, unusually, on one woman’s arm. She saw it on another’s neck, and wondered if it brought them any protection. Most of them, Toast noted, had masks and body mods, making it impossible to tell if they were full-lives or not.

They hustled along, the night women in the same physical tangle that, Toast recalled, she and her Sisters fell into so easily in the Vault. A girl her height, loping along in shoes that didn’t match, asked, “Seriously, how long does it take the Imperator to kill someone? The bookies aren’t taking bets on whether she’ll win or lose, just how long the Rock Rider will last.”

“Whether she’ll draw it out or kill her fast!” the girl’s companion added.

“Fast,” Toast had to admit. They urged her for more details. Toast named a span of time, based on when Max had come upon them in the Wasteland and he, Furiosa, and the rest of them had grappled. This satisfied them. They began to chatter excitedly about how many guzzoline tokens they were willing to risk, how there hadn’t been an all-woman fight in years, and how much they hoped to profit, afterwards.

Soon, the pipes thinned and dove into the ground or tanks, to be replaced by a growing crowd and increasing light. Gastown was out in force for the spectacle. Toast’s cluster of six women broke up to make their bets and show off before working later. “There’s the Court,” said the girl her height. “Hold on to anything in your pockets. We’ll be telling how we met you all night. Which one are you, again?”

Suddenly, her first name, the one her Sisters called her, was precious. “They call me the Knowing.”

“Bye, Knowing. Barter up!” It sounded well meant. Toast locked her fingers around Furiosa’s pistol, which was thankfully still there, and pressed her left elbow against her other pistol. She surveyed the mob, trying to think defensively, like the Ace. It looked like a good half of Gastown was there, intent on the fight to come. Relieved, she picked a thin spot in the crowd to try and shoulder her way to the front. Sometimes, people told Toast she was short. Which wasn’t true - everyone else was too tall. It was to her advantage tonight as the ducked and hip-checked through to the edge of the Court.

When she made it there, she only had a second to breathe before a hand fell on her shoulder with an over-familiar grip. Thinking of Furiosa’s boots for the fight, she lurched back and stamped hard on the man’s foot. “Fanging smeg, leave me alone or I’ll – Max! Sorry! Sorry!”

Toast had only recognized Max by his grunt of pain. The minute she heard him, she smelled him, and it was Max, all right. She’d sat directly behind him for most of the Fury Road, getting his sharply rancid smell up her nose. He reeked the same tonight, enough to cut through the Gastown sulphur.

“Was that your brace leg?”

“Mnh.” Max pulled down his gray face scarf. He looked awful, pale, with just the wrong amount of stubble. Hoarse and urgent, he said, “Followed you here. Need your help. Get me right up to her, after, before anyone else.” He had to mean Furiosa.

Toast felt herself light up. “Yes! You think she’ll live?”

“Through this fight.”

The crowd shifted forwards. Toast looked around the Court. Enforcers with flamethrowers were spaced around the edges. She saw how a flamethrower was a better weapon inside Gastown, perfect for a sweeping threat to a crowd without damaging the pipe works.

Along each side of the Court, high overhead, golden gaslights had replaced old wiretech bulbs in tall metal lamps. They hissed and flared up to a surprising, paler brightness. In the alley of wavering shadow between the lit edges of the Court, Toast saw two figures: Furiosa and the Rock Rider woman. Each of them was standing on a faded, painted line.

“Where’s the War Boys – no, I see them.” Bare-chested and bare-faced in fresh white, they stood out like ghosts in the Gastown crowd on the opposite side of the Court. Toast saw the three Rock Riders over there, as well. Behind them, stands of metal benches were packed with Gastown worthies. She saw technicians in blue and grimy white, faces dark with goggles and masks, and a cluster of gray and black at one end that might shelter the Jade. At the very back, Polecats were balancing on poles and stilts to see. In the center was a dark, glassed-in box. She’d have placed a bet with her companions earlier that it held the Arbiter.

Surrounding her and Max, the coarser side of Gastown was growing restive. They began to start chants, here and there. She caught “Gastown style!” going around, and plenty of people were bawling for the fight to start, already.

Then, someone near them called out, “Burn her down, like Last Tree!” The bored crowd liked it, and took up the chant. Toast chilled. She’d seen that name earlier, in the Jade’s accounting ledger. Furiosa’s final raid for the Immortan had been against a settlement called Last Tree Station.

Were they chanting it for Furiosa, or against her?

* * *

Furiosa knew she had been on time for the fight to the minute. They had been dragging off the last fight’s loser when she arrived, and the cracked concrete of the Court was still stained. She and her challenger, the Rock Rider woman, had been frisked for concealed weapons with a thoroughness that she male fighters were probably spared.

As expected, there was a last minute debate as to whether her prosthetic was a weapon. To the Rock Rider’s dismay, the stubby referee allowed Furiosa to keep it. If the Arbiter had been there, it might have gone differently, but he was nowhere to be seen. Furiosa turned her anger inwards to fuel the fight. She was going to need it. After her injuries and her changed life, she wasn’t at the peak of her strength, and might never be again.

Furiosa weighed up her unarmed opponent, unmasked, like herself. Shorter than herself, her upper body trim, with enviably solid legs from living in the Rock Rider’s heights. She’d scared up matching shoes, nothing as good as Furiosa’s war boots. There was strength and experience, there: the light emphasized the lines between her nose and her mouth. But not, Furiosa judged, experience in fighting hand to hand. The Rock Riders cycled like dust devils and cooked up explosives, instead. This one didn’t even know to tie her long tangle of hair back. The Citadel look was a shaved head for a reason.

It struck her that this woman had lived the life Furiosa should have had with the Vuvalini. Being with her family, with her tribe. Living free, cycling across the Wasteland sands and stones. Knowing her kin well enough to have her heart broken when one of them died.

Her opponent was hollow-eyed, staring and shaking, drinking Furiosa in, intently. Her stance held the madness of a War Boy with one lump too many, on the edge. You couldn’t make them live, when they were like that. This woman might have found a cure. Furiosa had learned, at long last, that if you moved through the sickening, consuming heart of grief to the other side, there was more life there.

If the grief of others would let her live it.

Were they never going to start? The Amnesty had to be a mere half hour away by now. The crowd was getting rough _. Burn her down, like Last Tree!_ hit Furiosa’s ears and made her flinch like a gunshot. Involuntarily, she flicked her eyes over the crowd on that side. Gastown was wasting enough fuel and light for her to see the front rows. White sleeves, and an unmasked face with a pointed chin, stood out.

Toast? What was she doing here?

Furiosa had tried to keep the Sisters protected from the darkness of the Citadel, of the Wasteland – and of herself. Toast’s presence was a triple failure, a stinging reminder of the choices that had led her here. She had brought Toast and Cheedo to Gastown to say that the Citadel had changed because she knew Gastown would never believe Imperator Furiosa. She had weighed the life of the Rock Rider against the Citadel, her people, her own value as a threat in waiting to keep the dubious peace of the Wasteland. Against all of that, she had judged the Rock Rider the loser. Now, she would be judged, in turn.

A crackle of enhanced sound cut through the air. The Arbiter, at last, speaking from somewhere safe, over a rare sound system, like the Immortan used to. Sphincters, the both of them. “Gastown gentles. I am the Arbiter, the Voice and the Law of Gastown. The final Court settlement before the Amnesty is before you for resolution. A blood kin murder awaits blood retribution.” He paused while the crowd roared.

“The challenger – known intimately to many of you: Kezia of the Rock Riders, now a Gastown citizen in good standing. For her brother’s blood vengeance, as is her lawful right.”

“The challenged: Imperator Furiosa, once praised by our former Warlord, Scabrous Scrotus, now current Warlord of the Citadel. Here seeking victory with warrior’s might.”

Furiosa scowled at the sound of his voice, out of reach, the way he shaped the spectacle. It hadn’t occurred to her to demand Cheedo as the Voice on her side, for this. The Arbiter linked her with the despised Scabrous and made her a murderer twice over before all of Gastown. The Arbiter’s next words made Furiosa cold with rage.

“As the Voice and the Law, I formally reprimand both parties for disturbing the peace and prosperity of Gastown and requiring these proceedings. They are mutually sentenced to this trial by combat, to be completed in sight of myself and two witnesses for challenged and challenger. No weapons, no parley, no leaving the bounds of the Court. The sole resolution of the dispute will be death of one combatant. The Law accedes that both parties are in compliance and agreement with these statutes. Now the price will be paid, and justice bereaves, as two souls enter and one killer leaves.”

“Begin…now.”

* * *

The crowd was sheer hell for Max. The noise made his head ring, and the bodies packed tight around him urged him to fight or flight. The only thing worse would have been being in front as a fighter. The added need to keep Toast, the wild card he needed, safe until after the fight, set him sweating again. For once, he was grateful for the Gastown stink, hiding his sweat. There were more Wastelanders like him mixed in the crowd than he’d expected. Their leathery skin, dirty with desert dust rather than grease, their varied gear, and their unease amidst the thick horde gave them away. Whatever went down here tonight was going to go out far and wide.

To block out the sound of the Arbiter’s voice, Max focused on Furiosa, held apart, poised to move at any moment. Furiosa was trapped at the crossroads where the Citadel, Gastown, and the Wasteland met – and making the Wasteland choice. Kill or be killed, gain or lose, honor your deal. As she shifted, restlessly, he thought of the Bartertown Thunderdome, and its wheel of punishment. It wasn’t spinning here, but it might as well be. Furiosa had already survived several turns of its sufferings: her amputation, her underworld (the Citadel, before), her hard labor (the Citadel, now). Acquittal or death were waiting for her tonight. Maybe even both.

Max compared Furiosa’s deals and choices to what he’d done at Organic’s. A day after confronting her, he couldn’t say any more that his slate was cleaner than hers. He hadn’t thought he’d sink to something like that, but, when it came to it, he’d done it.

He forced himself to not shield his ears as the crowd screamed for the fight beginning at last.

The Rock Rider’s first actions made him flinch. All the bad advice of the Gastown dancehall moved before his eyes in her poor body. Furiosa, on the other hand, retained her balance. Her face hardened, and he had to nod in approbation, seeing her in the moment, pure. Showing them all how it was done.

How to survive.

No wonder he’d gone down for her. Asking for her touch had been giving in to every fight he’d felt himself on the edge of losing, everything he felt he didn’t deserve. He felt a pulse of his earlier urge towards death and its relief, its end to the difficulty of love, and forced it down to focus. A job to do always made him that much saner.

Max judged that the fight was at a point of no return. He closed his eyes, drew down his hood. He was going to need as much muscle and night vision as he could muster, the moment the Amnesty sirens split his ears.

Max braced himself, ready to make his world free and clean.

*

Furiosa let her opponent make the first move. The woman was hungry for it, trembling, balling her fists and starting to shift back and forth. Furiosa felt the cold blood of war fill her, and opened her right hand flat, to brace or block. With her life at stake, the crowd wasn’t important: she forced them out of her perceptions and numbed herself to Toast’s presence. Her opponent was all.

Sure enough, the first move was a fist at her face, almost too easy for Furiosa to seize and drag along. The other woman whirled by her, pulled by her own momentum. Furiosa spun to stay facing her.

The second move was a repeat, with an added attempt to tangle an ankle between Furiosa’s boots to trip her. Respectable, but it left Furiosa only slightly knocked, and standing, with the Rock Rider spun away again.

Her opponent returned for another feint, trying, roughly, to seize Furiosa’s head. Now they were down to business. Furiosa twisted away and elbowed her in the small of her back. The blow paused her. Furiosa went to grab her hair –

Her hair was _oiled_ –

Thrown off for once in her life, Furiosa let go, leaping away. She swiped her crude-slick hand over her own head, making herself harder to grip, then down the front of her shirt. Her opponent looked at her with triumph. In reply, Furiosa snarled and hurled herself forwards. If she had to use her whole body to kill, that’s what she’d do.

They went down together. Her opponent took the fall decently, with a diverting twist that gave them both enough momentum to roll to their knees. Of course, a Rock Rider could take a tumble.

They were still tight enough that, when Furiosa raked her metal arm at the dangling, oiled hair, it tangled in the elaborate joints of her wrist. They were linked together. With a shrill scream of pain, her opponent reached for the pulled locks. Furiosa was faster, jerking the metal arm back while rocking her entire body, bringing the back of her opponent’s head against her collarbones. Furiosa’s flesh arm snaked around the other woman’s throat, to trap her larynx and crush.

The other woman clutched Furiosa’s arm, trying to pull away and buck upwards at the same time. Furiosa let them half-rise together, pouring everything into staying grounded and tightening her killing arm, relentlessly. With a gasping choke, the Rock Rider collapsed weighty into Furiosa’s embrace.

Furiosa didn’t dare risk using her oiled hand to crank her opponent’s head over, in the hope of snapping her neck. She kept crushing, counting, until her opponent had been lax for half a minute.

She shifted and snapped the metal arm back, cracking the back of her opponent’s head against the concrete ground. To be absolutely certain, Furiosa pulled her opponent up, placed her right hand against the pale forehead, and repeated the blow, with more force.

Furiosa gave the other woman a small shake, and felt her laxness. Her mouth was open, lips drained, eyes revealing only a narrow gleam. Furiosa saw a firm dusting of dark freckles over the bridge of her nose. She placed fingertips against the arched throat, waiting to feel a pulse. Nothing.

The other woman was dead.

The rest of the world faded back, the Court and the crowd. Furiosa realized she should stand. The wall of watchers greeted her rise with a raw yell of Gastown bloodlust. Her name, and Death, and Last Tree, and baying human howls. Furiosa, numb and reeling, barely heard.

She was still attached to the other woman by tangled, oiled hair. Near-panic flared for several seconds: using her living hand to try and pull the hair away only slicked her up again. Furiosa half-knelt, scooping the body close. Her opponent’s back was so narrow, she flashed back to the time she’d clasped Cheedo on the Fury Road. She yanked her left arm back, wincing as hair ripped, stuck in her prosthetic wrist’s workings. Free, she stood again. The prosthetic straps remained cutting, like she still hauled the weight of the Rock Rider. She pulled at the straps with her live hand, but the eerie sensation remained.

Furiosa couldn’t help but glance towards Toast. Toast was frozen, staring. Furiosa looked to the Rock Rider and curled her living fist in the air, pulling it towards her heart. Toast’s expression didn’t change.

Beside Toast, Furiosa, still honed with adrenaline, flooded with every detail, glimpsed Max’s mouth, full and stern, under a hood. Whatever was ruined between them, he had come to witness. She couldn’t tell what further judgement he was hiding.

The Arbiter’s voice took the air again. He sounded pleased. “These proceedings at the Court are complete. The dispute is resolved: Imperator Furiosa wins. The hour is midnight, and the Amnesty begins. As the Voice of Gastown’s legal powers, I declare the gates open for forty-eight hours. At the peak of the Amnesty, twenty-four hours from now, all comers with unsated bloodlust are welcome to view and compete in the Gastown Thunderdome. I’m certain we will see you there. Until then, go forth, deal fair - and beware.”

Furiosa jolted as the siren of the Amnesty screamed. The golden-white lights went dead, plunging the Court into darkness, rendering her near blind.

* * *

The siren’s scream felt just right to Toast. The fight had been as horrible as the first sight of Gastown. After letting the Rock Rider poke around her for a bit, Furiosa had dealt out death with a brutal, snarling face. She’d moved so fast, it was hard to see exactly what was happening, until they were twined together in Furiosa’s death grip. Toast had been trying hard enough that she knew how much fighting had come before that quickness.

Picking someone off with a rifle was a death at arm’s length. It was how Furiosa had killed and killed again on the Fury Road, how the Vuvalini had survived, like she had killed, herself, one time lucky. This had been different.

Whether or not she could do what she’d just seen – she didn’t want to.

Toast didn’t know what was worse, seeing Furiosa stripped down to a death machine, paying the late cost of winning Toast’s freedom, that of the Sisters, the Citadel. Or the howling joy of the Gastown people as they watched one woman be strong, another die, as entertainment. She feared for the six women who’d walked her there, offering their bodies now to the riled crowd. Understood the Vuvalini, so quick to snap before their bodies and their own deaths became cruel entertainment, like this had been.

It came to Toast that Furiosa wasn’t the Anti-Death. Not with what she had been and done, and what she’d probably do again. What they’d need her to do, again.

It was up to Toast to find that balance, somehow.

Max was bruising her arm with his grip. “Now?”

“Yes,” Toast said, and he jerked her forwards. She stumbled in the sudden darkness. “Don’t go far, remember, Furiosa isn’t armed.”

Max dragged her up to Furiosa. She was standing there, swaying, silent. Toast could just make out the shadowed silhouettes of the three Rock Riders. They were braced in front of their dead friend, their stance angry, wary of deadly Furiosa.

Toast shoved Max at Furiosa. “He says he has to talk to you right away!” Furiosa blinked, and Toast plunged between her and the Rock Riders. “I’m Citadel. She’s sorry. She didn’t want this. We’re all sorry. Does the deal between the Citadel and the Rock Riders still hold?”

Taken aback, the Rock Riders exchanged looks. They spoke in their strange, communal way. “Not enough of us to say.”

“She left us to do this.”

“Send someone after the Amnesty. Never _her_ , again. Someone else.”

“’Scuse me,” said someone to the Rock Riders. A Gastown character, goggles catching some stray light. “You don’t wanna haul her out, right? Spare you the trouble. I got a customer interested. They’ll barter a premium.”

The Rock Riders looked at each other and, as one, unsheathed long knives. One shouted at Toast, “You. First Citadel amends. Watch Kezia’s body. No one touches her!” The other two had already leapt on the Gastown man.

The milling crowd was starting to spill onto the Court, and the whited War Boys were the easiest to see out of all of them, coming up to her. “You’re supposed to be back there,” one War Boy blustered, to Toast.

“You’re supposed to be by Furiosa’s side. Where is she?” Toast snapped back.

“Uh…” In the darkness and chaos launching the Amnesty, Furiosa and Max were nowhere to be found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Bartertown Wheel – As seen in _Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome_ , the wheel of punishments included: Death, Hard Labour, Acquittal, Gulag, Aunty’s Choice, Spin Again, Forfeit Goods, Underworld, Amputation, Life Imprisonment.


	11. Unlifted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 11: After the duel, Max makes his move at last, and secrets are revealed.

In the heedless moment after the Amnesty came down, Furiosa had been swaying in place, trying to regain some vision and gauge the threat of three angry Rock Riders in the sudden dark. It took her a moment to remember that she was unarmed. Her prosthetic was useless until she could untangle her dead opponent's hair from her wrist joints. Then, she heard familiar steps and voices behind her. Toast was saying, breathless, “He says he has to talk to you right away!” As Furiosa blinked, her right arm was seized by a Gastown shadow. Her body was ahead of her mind in recognizing Max, going lax and letting her be dragged from the Court. She could just discern that he'd covered his worn leathers with an extra layer, something dark.

The Gastown crowd was milling and cursing in the sudden gloom. Max barrelled through for both of them. Furiosa folded tight behind him, matching his stride, until the semi-darkness  became tangled. The northern start of the pipe works loomed in front of them. Furiosa’s throat began to burn as the Gastown fumes kicked up. Max let her slow and pause, looking ahead keenly. _Yes,_ she thought, _good, he’s on it._ He shifted his grip up her arm to her right shoulder.

Then the world spun, and her back was meeting the pipe grid, hard.

Furiosa rocked away from the metal, half-stunned and half-outraged. Before she could speak, Max seized her right wrist and rammed himself against her. He pinned her to the pipes, his hips against hers, holding her hand high. Furiosa had every sense but sight: she smelled the musky heat of him, felt him iron-hard with tension, heard his breath seethe, tasted his blood from her own veins, between her jolted teeth. She knew Max was in that fighter’s space with her, that still, slow-burning space.

Max leaned in so they were face to face, to breathe, “The Arbiter wants you dead.”

Agile even with his left hand, he crushed a pressure point in her wrist. Her own hand convulsed open. She twisted in the pain her own fight had spared her. He stabbed something painfully hard into her palm, then released it so her fingers closed around metal. 

“You have to get out of here,” Max rasped.

“Out of here?"

“He’s hiring. I took the hit. To keep anyone else from trying.”

Furiosa felt her eyes widen in horror. “The Arbiter hired you to kill me,” she managed.

“Mph.”

With bitter humor, she said, “Guess you did all right hiding that you were with us.”

Max wasn’t amused. “I’m breaking the deal. I’ll be dead in Gastown once they know.” He was right. Every flamethrower in town would have his name on it. Max stood back and ripped off the incongruous dark robe. Furiosa was just starting to have some night vision, enough to see his beaten, pauldroned jacket, as he held the robe out to her. “Put this on. Put this on _now_. You’re a target. I may not be the only one. You need to get out. Take my car. You know how fast it goes. No way I can guzz her up now. She’s a thirsty bitch.” Max thrust the coarse robe at Furiosa again. She realized what she was holding in her right hand.

He’d given her the key to his car.

She pocketed the key. Then, it was her turn to swing him one-handed against the cluster of pipes. He took it well, like he’d expected it. “Organic? Did you?”

Max understood. “Put a hurting on him. He’s taken in a kid, off the Gastown street. Offered me a deal for his life – said he'd fix someone up if I brought them in. I told him to double it. One for him, one for the kid. Told him he’d better look after the kid like he was saying.”

“You made a deal with Organic? After double-crossing the Arbiter?” Furiosa couldn’t help rattling his shoulder. “You hated me for the deals I did. You couldn’t wait two days for vengeance for the sake of the Citadel you sent me to!”

“I know. I.” With a bleak shudder, Max admitted, “I can’t live with you dead.”

Her heart was coiled with heat again, but without the pain. He’d done what she’d urged him to, sixteen days ago, on that blazing night. Stayed himself, and returned to her.

Furiosa flung herself against him, sealing her mouth against his. Max arced against her, hot and silent, gripping her like he was dying, himself. For a long minute, she tasted him, explored him, felt him open. When she had to breathe herself, he pulled back just enough to say, “You still…” He gave himself a shake, gripping her ribs again. It was too shadowy to see his eyes, but she felt his stubble brush her as he levered himself off the pipes. “Gotta move. You had any signs today? About this?”

She backed off and snatched the robe from him to drag it on. Unpleasantly, Furiosa was reminded of the Jade and her concealing veils, her unconcealed dislike. “Maybe.” The gauntlets Max offered didn’t go over her left hand. “Now what?”

“If you won’t take the car and run with the girls? No idea.”

Furiosa felt herself scowl. “Not saying we won't. Or you won't. All I know is we have to stay together, for now. That was what worked on the Fury Road. Everyone.”

Max grunted in denial. “Nuh-uh. Not getting a Rig out of here tonight. Wasteland’s trying to get in. The Amnesty!”

“You were with Toast?” Max pointed. Toast, in her pale sleeves, and the white War Boys were sitting targets in the middle of the Court. For some reason, nobody was going near them or the Rock Riders. Without discussing it further, Max’s right shoulder to Furiosa’s left, they pierced the thinning crowd. Twice alive beside Max, she was sharp with joy.

Arriving, Furiosa had to pull the robe's hood back for Toast and the War Boys to register that it was her. Toast beat them to saying anything. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. Let’s go!”

“Back the way you and I came,” said Max, steering them to the right. “Off the main drag. Toast, you and the Boys in front, ten paces. Scarves.” Toast and Furiosa both wrapped their faces. With the gates open, flooding Gastown with trade and strangers, they were flowing with the crowd. They made it back as two separate parties, with the War Boys only having to get threatening on Toast’s behalf twice. For Furiosa, it was, briefly, the opposite of the grueling progress to the Court, down Gastown's main laneway, calcified in her Citadel role. Walking beside Max, hidden in robes herself, tall enough to pass for a man, she felt an edge of freedom for the ten-minute walk.

Close to the Establishment Tower, Max stopped Furiosa. “What now?”

Finally, she could see Max's face. He was haggard and hollow-eyed, but present. She didn't have a choice about trusting him, and that was a relief. “Reuniting. Upstairs is easy to defend. Gastown's Executive Board won’t burn their own building down. Can you get back up, the back way?” Max grunted. “We’ll go in the front. I’ll get the Boys to stop anyone else entering the building until the lift opens.”

For precious seconds, their magnetism held them beside each other. Reluctantly, she left him and joined Toast and the War Boys.

Entering the Establishment Tower's spacious foyer again, well lit, tiles only slightly cracked, felt like awakening from a dream after the ordeal of the Court and the dark, dangerous, freeing run through Gastown with Max. Obedient to the letter, each proud War Boy took a side of the main door, doubling up with the inside Gastown enforcers as if it was personal. The Gastown enforcers responded to the attention amicably, hissing questions about the duel and how the Amnesty was going. They glanced at Toast and Furiosa. Toast rolled her hand, encouraging them to talk.

Furiosa was wondering how to call Toast out for placing herself in danger when the Establishment lobby attendant glimpsed her metal hand and perked up. “Congratulations, Imperator. Planning to celebrate? Need anything? Chrome? Decent liquor? Brothel outcall?”

“We’re FINE,” Toast growled, sparing Furiosa the trouble. With one of her savage glares, Toast added, “Maybe you should go see how the Amnesty’s doing outside. For a couple minutes.” She stabbed the lift button. The attendant slithered off.

Furiosa felt a level of adrenaline drain away in the increased privacy. Aches were emerging, especially her left shoulder and the back of her head, where she'd met the pipe grid. She recalled, late, that Toast had spent much of the afternoon with the Jade. Neutrally, she asked, “What’s your news, Toast?”

“The Rock Riders aren’t breaking their deal with the Citadel over this, I don’t think.”

“That’s the least of our problems right now,” Furiosa said.

Toast fumed, “They were pretty mad at you out there!”

Furiosa leaned in, close. The double highs of surviving and Max thinned enough for her to snap, “What were you thinking? Coming out to watch the duel like that? When everyone agreed to stay safe? You wouldn’t have done that on the Fury Road.”

Toast, her back against the wall with the lift buttons, looked up, undaunted. “Us Sisters had to send a Witness after what you did for us. It’s not like I didn’t help. I talked down the Rock Riders, after, and brought you Max.” Her face was tight.

Furiosa said, coldly, “Did you know the Arbiter had contracted Max to assassinate me?

Toast paled. “No. No. NO.”

“He took the deal and broke it to warn me. It doesn't mean there won't be another attempt. We’re all in danger. That’s what he needed to tell me. It’s why the War Boys are on the door here, so nobody else comes in behind us, and why Max is going up first, to warn them. I want all of us together again, then we’ll strategize.” Furiosa felt her numbness from earlier in the day returning as she described their dire situation. In the silence, she pressed the lift button, herself. Then, she started to worry at the hair still dangling from the wrist joint of her prosthetic.

Toast asked, “Do you want help with that?”

“Mnh.” Furiosa held her arm out. “You spent more time with the Jade today. Do you think she’s with the Arbiter on this?”

Toast’s head was bowed over the metal. “I don’t think the Jade wants you dead. She didn’t trust you: she compared you to Scabrous.” Furiosa’s adrenaline eddied further, leaving her feeling sick. Toast extracted the thickest strip of hair, coiled it quickly, and returned to untangling. “The Jade didn’t believe about the Citadel council until Cheedo and I argued in front of her. She doesn’t like you but she’s willing to deal. Her story's something."

Furiosa let her lip curl. “I can imagine. What’s her problem with me?”

Toast was taking forever to unwind the last of the hair, bit by bit. “She showed me lists of the supplies you used on raids. For the Immortan.”

Ah.

Damn it. Toast’s hand had gone heavy: there was that pull against her prosthetic’s bindings, again. She took her arm back from Toast and stepped away to jerk at the straps. “That...was a long time ago. I've left that behind.” 

Toast glanced up at last, accusing eyes a stab of black and white. “Have you? I thought you looked pretty happy, earlier, for somebody who just killed.” Furiosa’s lips parted. Her joy about regaining Max had been misread – and she didn’t know what to say while protecting Max’s anger and shame. She poked the lift button. It was high time they got moving again.

Toast held out the lock of hair from the Rock Rider. She had curled the hair into a neat ring, dark as oiled metal, against her small, perfect hand. “I’m done, Furiosa. Do you want this?”

Furiosa stared at the dark circle, uniting her past with her future.

Suddenly, the whole night, the Rock Rider's face flashing in her memory, felt like a crash, a plunge. It was too close to Last Tree, or to the road war run where her Rig’s crew was almost obliterated almost to a man. Furiosa knew what was waiting for her again, if they left Gastown alive. The warrior’s cycle that took longer to break, each time. Nights jolted with repeating dreams of violence, absent days, a mind with edges that curled in agony, like cannibal’s vellum set on fire. Before it could break her, as it had broken Max more than once, she’d tried to outrun it with redemption.  With Toast truly the Knowing, now, would she be denied even the attempt? She imagined Toast speaking to the Citadel Council, protesting. Or drawing Max aside for a word to pierce his resilient conscience.

The Rock Rider would have her revenge, more than she'd ever imagined.

“Furiosa?”

“No,” she managed.

“I’ll keep it. I’ll remember.” Toast tucked the lock into a pocket. Furiosa registered that she was trembling, slightly. “This pistol you handed me. Did you get this in a raid?”

“No,” she said, again. Some black compulsion led Furiosa to admit, “I took it off the first man I killed. He deserved it as much as the last one I killed.”

Toast’s face convulsed into anger. “That woman didn’t deserve it!” she cried.

“I meant the Immortan. The Rock Rider was different. You saw what I did, the best I could. Even as the Citadel’s warlord. I killed her like I would kill myself!”

“Like you would kill yourself,” Toast repeated, aghast. “Listen to what you're saying.  You never called yourself a warlord at the Citadel. I was one of the Sisters there, and now I’m your aide. A warlord’s aide.”

Toast’s face hardened. “I’m not Angharad or Capable. They said our children won’t be warlords…we forgot to say what we wouldn’t be. I’m not them, but I am a Sister. I want the Citadel to be free. I know what that means in the Wasteland. Especially as a woman. But I won’t help with the other raids. You know the ones. They’re just death and barter. They’re wrong. We have to do better.”

Furiosa bared her teeth at this idealism. “With the Sun Touchers out there, and the Citadel short on fighters, those other raids may be the price of the Citadel.”

“No. There is a way. There has to be. But I have to decide…” Toast looked out the triple glass doors of the Establishment, at Gastown. With the sudden view of Toast’s profile, and Toast's neglected hair growing longer, for an instant, Furiosa was looking at a stern, beautiful stranger.

“Decide what?”

Toast was abstracted. She took a few steps forwards, then came back. Fear restored her to the anxious, too-aware Toast that Furiosa had first seen in the Vault. Urgent and low, she said, “He's out there. Not upstairs. He's walking around out there, back and forth. I see his shoulder thing. On his leather jacket.” It hit Furiosa, with a descending chill, that Toast was sharper than her, not saying Max’s name aloud before the Gastown guards. And that if Max was out there, he hadn’t succeeded in getting upstairs.

“Something’s wrong,” Toast said. Their eyes met.

The lift pinged.

Slowly, they both turned around.

And all chaos broke loose as half the Citadel party, streaked bloody, fell out, roaring.

“Furiosa! Toast! You’re here! Help!” cried Cheedo, between the Ace and another bloodied War Boy slumped against her.

“Joe-damn attacked upstairs –" gasped the Ace. The crimson scarf she’d given him blended with gore streaking his white body. Furiosa registered a crossbow bolt buried between his chest and right shoulder. A shove from behind sent him forwards into Furiosa’s arms.

More War Boys emerged, their names piercing Furiosa: Turbo was hauling Gearshank, looking well and truly shanked himself, head lolling back, yet again horribly striped with blood. What had happened? The History Man was supporting him behind, coughing, and urged Cheedo out, too. “Thank Christ you’re both back alive. Someone’s out to assassinate you, Imperator. Ace and the Boys took him, at a price, and we’ve been smoked out. The others are hammering down the back way.”

Sagging under the weight of the Ace, alive for the moment, Furiosa yelled, “War Boys! Cover your guards! Toast. Go to him, out there, give him this –" she managed to extract Max’s car key – “and beg him to let us have his deal, instead! He’ll know!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No Wordburgers this chapter - you know it's serious!


	12. The Knowing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An assassination attempt brings the Citadel team to their least favorite medical professional. With their lives and the Citadel’s future on the line, Toast pits her Knowing against Gastown machinations.

Toast hurtled out of the Establishment Tower before the doorway tangle of Gastown enforcers and War Boys could stop her. She had glimpsed Max’s silhouette hovering out front. He was still their secret in Gastown - barely. She forced herself to pause, look around, and listen to the calls of other lingering Gastown vendors. Only then did she amble sidewise up to Max’s restless silhouette.

Max gave her a grunt of approval, then hunched over her. “Guards on the alert in back. Someone got piked. No way up right now.”

“Someone else tried to kill Furiosa from upstairs and they got the Ace instead but he’s still alive. For now. Furiosa said to give you this key in exchange for your other deal? What other deal?”

“Organic’s alive –"

“Not that schlanger!” Toast gasped.

“I’ve got life credits from him. He’ll fix the Ace up for the credits.” Max snatched the key back. He dug into his pocket and dumped two rough metal tokens in her cupped hand, like they burned him.

“Why is he giving you life credits? Where is he? How is he here? Can you bring him here?”

Max looked over her shoulder and pointed. Beside the Establishment Tower, skinny, worn men with filter masks were waiting, ready to pull you along in a cart if you were too good to walk on the Gastown pathways. “Grab those. To Fume Alley, by the big chem godown. Signs for Joe Sawbones. Meet you there?” When she nodded, he was gone.

Toast shot back in time to meet the Citadel group as they began to fill the lobby, a tangle of blood-stained War Boys. Furiosa had let go of the Ace to clench the History Man’s arm while he explained.

“Here’s what happened in your absence, Imperator. You left. Cheedo asked for a Tell – that girl is a charmer – perhaps I got too wrapped up. Our balcony guard War Boy got listening and took a few minutes to go out. Toast, Cheedo said you were lying down, unhappy. We heard the siren for the Amnesty. When you didn’t emerge after that racket, Cheedo confessed. Could you let go just a little, Imperator? I won’t bolt. Thank you. The Ace went to ask the balcony guard what he’d seen. The guard wasn’t one of ours, any more. The decoy Boy threw a sulphur smoke bomb when he was rumbled, and went for the Ace, even in the smoke. We managed to grab the lift to get down here and breathe. Here's the second batch of our Boys off the lift, now.”

“The scarf. Furiosa, the Ace had your red scarf,” said Toast, with a sinking feeling. Her distracting the Establishment guard on her way out might have given the assassin the moment he needed to get to the balcony.

Right when Furiosa inhaled, either angry or miserable, the History Man handed over the old-fashioned rifle he’d been hauling around, under his robes. “Here, take this.”

Furiosa seized it and snapped the safety off. “Better than nothing. Toast, did he say yes?”

Toast said, “Got the life credits, got where we’re going. Fume Alley? There’s signs.”

“Smeg, there? Not close,” choked the Ace.

The History Man yelped, “The rickshaws! I saw them last night.” Before anyone could ask what the wordburger meant, he was out front, whipping off his flowing robe and talking fast to a nearly-naked cart puller. Shortly, a newly dressed cart puller was loading up the Ace, a War Boy, and Cheedo. A second cart puller hovered while the History Man worked on his boots, yelling, “I’ll throw in the socks!”

Toast and Furiosa shoved up the last two wounded War Boys. “Going to Fume Alley, near the chem godown,” Toast repeated.

The rickshaw drivers groaned. One of them said, “I would’ve charged more if I’d known! Damn Citadel deals.”

Furiosa simply raised the rifle. “Move.”

Toast ordered History, “Get up in the cart. You haven’t got boots!” To Furiosa, she said, “Max will meet us there. Hide the rifle. They get aggressive about guns here – risk to the pipes.” Furiosa scowled, tucked it under the robe, and pulled the hood further forwards as the carts started rolling.

Another Gastown street dash followed, through tangled shadow and fitful gaslight. With the two loaded carts, six running War Boys, a robed dark figure, and Toast, they ran a gauntlet of watchers down the main laneway, garnering catcalls. Toast caught a feminine scream. “Knowing! Knowing!” She couldn’t help turning, even as she tried to stay in sight of the Citadel carts.

A pair of the women from earlier reeled out and danced alongside Toast. One said, “The bets. Your help with the bets. We won ten liters credit! Each! I don’t have to go with any Wastelanders now.” She half-keeled over. Her eyes were almost all pupil.

“That’s…good?” Toast managed, staying moving.

Her companion said, firmly, “They’re savages and freaks out there, not like us. Gastown’s civilized.” She dragged her friend upright. “Straighten up, I want some barbecue before the stands run out.”

The two women kept pace with Toast long enough to chorus, “Gastown or Citadel, who’ll do you harder? Gastown girls, ‘cause we get that barter!” Then they took a turn to the left, waving and laughing.

After the other women peeled off, the Citadel group turned right. Soon they were pounding slippery dirt alleys lined with spacious, rusting Before-time storage buildings, ramshackle After-time shanties crammed between. The Gastown atmosphere picked up a new, piercing chemical note, and Furiosa began to cough under her hood. Toast was finally able to catch up to her. “The signs?” Furiosa asked.

Toast scanned the alley, reading aloud. “Biohazard…Trespassers Will Be Flamed…High Supply…here, this one, Joe Sawbones. This is the place.” She started as one of the shadows flowed alive. Max had beaten them there. Maybe that was why this alley was empty. He looked at them all with a finger on his lips for silence. Furiosa hissed, backing him up, and the War Boys quieted down.

Max knocked on the door.

Toast started when a little boy opened it, skinny as a Citadel War Pup under an adorable mop of dark curls. He blinked his big, dark eyes and called out, “The sphincter’s back! With a bunch of smegheads and whores!”

Organic’s broad, small-featured face, wreathed in bandages, squinted over the boy’s head. “Smegheads and whores? I’ll say.” The group gasped and muttered. After everything else that night, seeing Organic still unsettled Toast. She went rigid as he flicked his eyes over Cheedo, his mouth tilting, and then started at the History Man. “There are more of you with the ink? Huh.”

Max growled and pointed. “You. Life credits. Them. Now.”

Organic’s smile became even more unsettling. “Which ones? I see three bleeders there and you’ve only got two credits.”

Max snarled in frustration. One of the War Boys said, “You’re bargaining with us now? Where’ve you been?”

“The Joe-damn convoy drove off without me when they saw the Bag of Nails driving back. By the time I hit the pass, the Rock Riders said the bitch was in charge at the Citadel. Bugger that. I went Gastown way.”

Furiosa silently flung back the black robe, including the hood, and stepped up, shouldering the rifle. Organic’s expression collapsed. He stepped back, pulling the boy inside. Toast drew out the pistol and called, “We’ve got your barter right here for a third life credit. Take it or leave it.”

“Fine! Fine! Unload them. Finish ruining my Amnesty. What cut them up like this?”

“The Ace got attacked with a crossbow and this.” Cheedo got down from the cart, awkwardly, and extracted a long, long coil of leather braided hard and round, on a handle.

As the injured were hauled in, Organic surveyed them. “Ace, good to see you, mate, not so good to see that bolt stuck near your subclavian artery. Looking right Gastown, Treads, slashed up like that. Edsel, you sit over there with your two bolts and don’t touch ‘em. The minute we pull them, you start your dying time. Looks like you all got collateral damage from the whip.” Organic’s voice rang happily as he declared, “Now that I’m not at the Joe-damned Citadel I can say this clay sunblock is going to lead to septic skin sweetness here. You all got hit with the same weapon, which ups the chance of going gangrene. Fun times!”

Toast had never seen Organic doing real triage before. He was barking orders to the child and the War Boys, soaking fabric pads, and whipping out equipment, grinning like a chromed-up maniac. Down in the Citadel, he must have been worth twenty War Boys after a battle. Feeling them all up in the Vault must have been his reward. Toast seethed, even while she registered that, in his element, he had forgotten that Cheedo and Toast were even there. Bravely, Cheedo was starting to edge forwards when Furiosa stopped her.

“Help when he’s done. I’ll go in now.” Furiosa handed the rifle to Max and joined the medical scrum. Max, History, Toast, and Cheedo were left watching.

Cheedo flung her arm around Toast’s shoulder. “I’m so glad she’s alive!” she said, looking at Furiosa. Her billowing dress was now bloodstained. She must have been body to body with the injured War Boys and Ace earlier, trying to help them. Toast gripped Cheedo’s waist, hard.

The History Man was saying to Max, “You doing all right?”

“Better.” Toast glanced over. Max was pulling up an entire word that wasn’t about survival? He must like the History Man.

On a grisly metal table, Organic was dealing with the Ace first. Furiosa had shouldered her way up to help hold the Ace down, warding him against Organic with her grim stance and her look. Organic, wet-lipped, flourished a pair of pliers. “Gonna pull this bolt. Hold him down hard! One. Two. Three.” There was a crunch, and a deep bellow of agony. All the watchers flinched. “Wey-hey, look at that, you’ve got a Gastown gusher there. Pads, Ambo.”

History mused, “Those poor War Boys. It’s another reason to be forgiving, Max. Suffering comes to us all, here in the Wasteland.”

“Mnh.”

They watched as Furiosa helped the Ace over to a ghastly-looking padded cot on one side. She detoured to them on the way back to the medical table. Her eyes hit Max. “You going to get out of here with the Sisters and History?”

“We can’t leave now,” said Toast. “The Citadel still hasn’t got guzz or a road south or a way to handle the Sun Touchers. Plus, if we don’t sort this out, Gastown will be against all of us. Then we’re really schlanged.”

Cheedo added, “They’re going to need me in a minute. I don’t want Organic touching them more than he has to, they’re our Boys.”

“Wordburger: Surrender? Don’t be bloody silly,” said the History Man.

Max was saying, “Your strategy. Everyone together. It’s good. Don’t know why, just is.”

“If one of the most dangerous men in the Wasteland approves, I trust his survivor’s instincts,” added History.

There was another shocked scream from the medical table. "Disinfectant. It's good for you! Builds character!" Organic laughed. Furiosa started forwards again. Cheedo followed. Max took the rifle and covered the front door. “Get some War Boys on the back,” he called. “There’s another door.”

Toast was left with the History Man. “Here we are, again. How did the duel go?” he asked, mildly.

“Oh. Um. It went. She did it really fast, I thought.”

He nodded. “That’s what I needed to hear. _Vae victis_ , Imperator…” It struck Toast, for the first time, that she might not have been the only one wrestling with Furiosa’s shadowed past.

While she thought, the History Man eyed the braided, bloodstained leather weapon, cast to one side. He picked it up by the handle and gave it a shake that made the length ripple obediently. “What a piece of salvage. Haven’t seen one of these in years. I was brought up on one of the Before-time farming stations. You had your Akubra hat and your stockwhip to show off for visitors.” Toast looked at the item that wasn't a hat. Obviously, she thought, farming stations used it as a weapon against trespassers.

Memory spurred her. “One of the stations that lasted to become a settlement?”

“An odd lingustic change there, but yes. Then, when the apocalypse really settled in, a raider’s target.”

Toast said, “Last Tree Station. That’s…an old Citadel raid. The crowd at the duel tonight was yelling about it.”

“Last Tree? Oh, yes, the Wretched knew that one. The whole Wasteland did.” That note in the History Man's voice. He’d known, from Wasteland histories, about Furiosa and the raids. He’d known and he was still there, helping the Citadel.

The most harrowing shriek yet split the chemical air in Organic’s shanty. They both looked at the medical table again, a battle of blood. Toast shunted her questions aside. They had to survive the night, and the day after, and her mind had another path to blaze.

She spun back to the History Man. “Three tries at sending someone to kill Furiosa tonight, all with something in common. The Wasteland! You said Max was a dangerous Wasteland man – what if that’s why the Arbiter hired him. Why the other killer had a stockwhip, like from a settlement, as a symbol. Same as in your poem on the way here. _Wrap me up in my stockwhip and blanket_. That may even be why the Rock Rider…”

“The Arbiter hired our Max as another assassin?” History gave Max a baffled look.

“Max said yes and warned Furiosa. The point is, I think the Arbiter wanted Furiosa’s death to look like Wasteland vengeance so the Citadel’s not mad at Gastown. Gastown would believe it, too. Gastown people don’t see themselves as Wastelanders, they think they’re better.”

“Ah-hah!” He grinned.

“Without Furiosa, maybe they thought the Citadel say yes to everything. Not just Gastown sending us fuel, and us sending them food, but getting our War Boys to do war with them, no questions asked. Recruiting you. They tried to recruit me, too! Next thing you know, we’re all blended together and Gastown’s running the Citadel. Gastown style! The Arbiter said it himself: he likes eating.”

“The Arbiter…or Gastown’s entire Executive Board?”

Toast frowned. “I don’t think the Jade was in on it. She doesn’t like Furiosa but she has other priorities.”

“Did you hear the Jade and I discussing her poisoning history at dinner? It’s her preferred _modus operandi_ , with weapons or without. None of the weapons used on our boys were poisoned. Another strike against her being involved.”

Toast looked around. The last War Boy was off Organic’s table. “Furiosa, Ace, Max, we need to talk to you. It’s important.”

Five minutes later, with Organic under a double War Boy guard in his back room and everyone caught up, they had moved on to debate the Jade’s involvement. Furiosa, perched by the Ace on his cot, was more dubious than any of them. “She compared me to Scabrous Scrotus. She tried recruiting Toast. Why shouldn’t she want me dead?”

“Better the devil you know,” said the Ace. “Anyone smart’s gotta know there’s worse out there if you’re knocked out.”

Cheedo said, “Why didn’t she try to recruit me?”

“The Jade might have been working up to it, Cheedo, asking you to be all nice and helpful. She talked to each of us in the ways we like. She told History her stories. She was serious with me,” said Toast, feeling her face harden.

“The old seducer,” said History, with a touch of admiration.

“If she isn’t in on trying to kill me?” said Furiosa.

Toast replied, “Then the Jade has a chance to get the Arbiter within the Law. To take Gastown for herself. I know for sure she wants to win against the Arbiter. Nek’Minute just wants to do war, and the Worksman doesn’t care about anything but his refinery.”

Everyone waited while Furiosa considered this. Finally, she said, “Assuming all this is correct, do we even want the Jade in charge of Gastown?”

“She has tried some good things. Getting them started with their own food, and … trying to protect others from the People Eater. That didn’t go so well, but she tried.”

The Ace rasped, “We need some kind of deal. Think of the War Boys and their V8s.”

“Beats the Arbiter,” said Max.

Cheedo chirped, “The Jade is a woman! Like us!”

“Like you, Toast, and Furiosa? Gastown doesn’t have a chance,” said History.

Toast met Furiosa’s eyes. “She trusted you to deal clean.”

Furiosa held her look. Somewhere between the Establishment Tower and holding down screaming War Boys, tears had streaked the Imperator’s black down her face. Her features were overlain with a skull of shadow. “Do you trust?” A double-barrelled question, asking about Toast and the Jade – or Toast and herself.

Toast caught herself glancing at the History Man. “If I can talk to somebody, speak my mind, I can trust them. Or work on it, at least.” She returned to Furiosa’s shadows. “Do you? Trust?”

“I trust based on actions, not words. Especially in Gastown.”

Toast flinched. “Fair enough. I know I can get up to the Jade if I go alone. The more scared I look, the better, probably. Then, I can talk to her – for all of us. Either, she isn’t in on the plot, and we get her to act with us to take the Arbiter down. Or, she is, and I say I’ll take up her offer in Gastown, but only if she keeps peace and trade, and lets you all live.”

Cheedo bounced up and gripped her arm. “Toast, no! Why does she even want you?” Toast clenched Cheedo back, hard, then stood away.

“Youth. Smarts. Succession,” said the History Man.

“Revenge against what she sees in me,” said Furiosa, bleakly. Toast swallowed. She understood Furiosa at last, her silences and her actions, right when it might be too late.

“Leaves us with an ally here,” the Ace said.

“You’d make such an informant,” mused the History Man. Even the old guys weren’t doubting her. Toast’s eyes went hot again.

“Don’t like it.” said Max.

“I’m with Max. But I don’t have a better action to try tonight.” Furiosa stood up, with a weary sway. “What do you need?”

Toast turned to Cheedo. “Your hair clips.”

Cheedo’s mouth turned down while she removed the pretty brass clips. “You don’t have to give the Jade a present.”

“Not for that. I’m going to use them to get me through Gastown to the Jade. To barter up!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers:
> 
>  _Surrender? Don’t be bloody silly_ – Australian military saying. Full quote is “Surrender? Don’t be bloody silly. We’re Australian.”  
>  _Vae victis_ – Woe to the conquered. Livy quote from 390 B.C.


	13. Dirty Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Power, forgiveness, and justice are on the table when one Gastown faction lays a trap for another, with Furiosa and Max as bait.

Max battled exhaustion as they all waited in Organic’s shop. After running his mind and body hard and rough, he could feel a screw rattling loose in the undercarriage of his mind, a crash lurking. A good honest Wasteland fight would have been less draining than double-dealing in Gastown. To pain himself awake, he curled his right fist, driving his fingernails into his palm.

By the time Toast and the History Man had dumped their information and the resulting plan on the rest of them, he could scarcely keep track, even though he'd been tangled up in it. He tried not to dwell on Toast heading out alone into the wild Gastown night. She had gone out the shanty door small and fierce and as normal as a Wastelander could be. Something at the core of Toast was both determined to survive and happy to just be human. Having her around made the world a little saner.

With Toast out the door, Furiosa was on the same road to a crash, he felt. She was keeping herself upright by the Ace. More than once, Max caught her staring into space, eyes empty, compulsively adjusting her prosthetic’s straps. The Ace was riding out his pain on one of the miserable cots. The other two injured War Boys were doubled up on the other cot, with Cheedo hovering. The still-uninjured War Boys were guarding either the exits or Organic himself, brought back in with them.

Max had dragged one of the tarps over to the door, sitting there with the rifle. He kept a baleful eye on Organic, at the back, whispering to his resentful apprentice. The History Man had slumped down beside Max. He rested his head on his own knees.

“The Citadel won’t be like it used to be, you said. How about a visit up there, you said. Miss Giddy’s students, you said. Bloody oath.”

Max shifted, uncomfortably. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “You were saying. Forgiveness.”

“I’m only venting, Max. Not angry with anyone here.”

“Not that.” Max was uncertain about how everything was turning out. This, he was sure of. “Forgiving isn’t fair.”

The History Man lifted his entirely tattoed head. “What is, in this world? Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. It isn’t foreswearing justice. We forgive for ourselves. To leave the pain, and find what’s next. There’s some forgiveness, right there.”

Furiosa was taking off the black robe Max had given her and draping it over the Ace, saying something he couldn’t hear. The Ace elbowed her, and she mustered a little smile. Max watched them, trying to smother a wave of jealousy, not daring to believe that she’d forgiven him earlier. He was going to have to eviscerate himself by asking. If they all lived through this.

Max should have known better than to get a History person started. “I remember getting kicked around by the War Boys when I lived amongst the Wretched. Watching Furiosa drive out for the Immortan. Wasteland rumors about a mad feral in a fast car, about the Immortan’s shiny, hapless breeders. And now?” The History Man smiled, as if the miserable room looked onto a refreshing green vista. “If Toast pulls this off, the mad lot of you might make this Wasteland truly live again.”

Cheedo had watched Furiosa, too. She came over to the door. “Max, do you have a knife?”

She was in the same room as Organic. He was surprised she hadn’t asked until now. When he offered the small, sharp one he’d used on Organic earlier, she started wrangling with her clothing. “It’s not just a dress, this. It’s got enough fabric to be a sun shelter, if I got caught in the Wastelands. Or it can be something else.” Cheedo started undoing clasps, then used the knife to snip threads. In a moment, she was standing there in a long white shift, and the pale green dress was two gigantic rectangles of cotton.

Cheedo danced back (where was she getting all this energy?) and wrapped up the two injured War Boys, one rectangle each, protecting them against Gastown’s grime. The other War Boys nodded. “Chrome,” one said. They weren’t her only watchers. Max stiffened when he saw Organic lick his lips, and twitched his eyes at Furiosa. She was ahead of him. Glaring at Organic, alight with cold anger, revved up and ready to collide.

“Eyes off, Organic,” Furiosa said.

Organic swallowed and began to gleam with sweat. “Keeping an eye, I mean, on watch, you know? Go, uh, see if the pretty lady needs help,” he managed, brushing the boy away.

Furiosa, meanwhile, was crossing the space. Even with a tired sway to her step, she was still menacing. Max stood when she paused at one of the two chairs. She said to Organic, “What have you been telling people about me?”

“I saved your life,” Organic said, trying to sound innocent.

“And that I was good to make a deal.”

“Well, yeah? Where’s the problem? Gastown loves deals. You knew when to make it easier, know what I mean? You looked after your crew, they were never that mangled. Even when you and I were both starting out and you brought in some whores, I never had to do a fistula repair on them, unlike –“

In a blink, Furiosa had swept up the battered wooden chair and smashed it against the back door’s frame, leaving her with a splintered chair leg in her metal hand. Organic froze, gaping. She leapt in, ramming the length of the chair leg against his throat.

“Don’t you ever. Ever. EVER talk about me again. Or the Wives. Or your past Blood Bags. Or else I am going to hunt you down like a Buzzard and give you a reason to have a fistula repair yourself.”

“Gotta say, men don’t normally require that type of fistula re _aghkkkkkk_ ,” Organic managed, as Furiosa pressed the chair leg.

She gritted, “I said, _you’ll have a reason_. Understand me, sphincter?”

Max heard progress outside. There were two women’s voices, and he recognized the flat, no-nonsense one: Toast. She sounded okay. “Incoming. Ours.” He turned as War Boys unlatched the door.

In a second, Toast was poking through the ragged plastic curtain. Her mouth opened when she saw Furiosa about to throttle Organic. She turned back and said to someone, with one hand raised, “This looks bad, but I am happy to vouch that it’s completely justified.”

Two gray-clad Gastown flunkies came in next - not standard enforcers. These were the really creepy ones, the ones who didn’t need flamethrowers. The figure that followed them finished catapulting Max into a state of full screaming alert. They were cloaked entirely in black, no way to see if they were a man or a woman, weak or strong. Max reacted from a glimpse of their eyes, their fearless stance, and his gut’s vivid recoil. This was a Wasteland rarity: somebody close to absolute power. This was trouble.

The personage said, “Hold, Imperator. From what the Knowing says, I have a use for this man.”

“Calling him a man is pushing it,” Toast said. “What do you think of handing Organic over to the Jade? They need a doctor here who knows about more than patching up burns.” Max noted the name and gender of this new power, tied it in to Toast’s revelations before she’d gone out. He didn’t relax at all.

Furiosa’s face changed into a terrible smile. She grabbed Organic and turned, whirling him forwards. He landed roughly, on all fours, at the Jade’s feet. “Yours on one condition. Sear him with the Gastown brand. He’s got enough Citadel enemies that you’d better give him a few extra mods. Label tats, maybe. To show that he’s Gastown property.”

Organic, levering up onto his knees, had decent instincts himself. Like Max, he was staring at the Jade, and he was blank with fascinated horror. “You. That one. The one who took on the People Eater.”

“In a manner of speaking,” the Jade simpered. “I think we’ll understand each other perfectly.” She snapped her fingers at one of the gray-clad figures and pointed at Organic.

Furiosa gave Max a quick glance. He half-smiled, lifting the rifle slightly. _Suffering comes to us all, here in the Wasteland._ About time. His heart sank, recalling his torture-hardwired distrust of Furiosa’s offering revenge against Organic as part of the negotiations. He hadn’t pictured something sweet as this. Another black mark against him.

Cheedo knelt down and tried talking to Organic’s apprentice. “You don’t have to stay here with him. Would you like to come with us to the Citadel? It’s really nice. There’s lots of other pups to play with.”

“No way. You brought the crazy man back. You’re all a bunch of sphincters!” the boy said. He ran back to Organic, hiding behind the enforcers.

“I understand you have hard evidence of an assassination plot against you, Imperator – be advised that the Gastown Executive Board was not privy to this plan. It seems that the Arbiter,” the Jade flexed her hands, snapping her bejewelled knuckles, “is in violation of our binding corporate rules and thereby vulnerable to legal repercussions.”

Toast had taken a stand between the Jade and Furiosa. “We need to catch out the Arbiter. What did he ask for, as proof that Furiosa was dead?”

A glance too many was sent Max’s way. On the spot, he muttered, “Mnh. Furisoa’s dead body.”

The Jade eyed Furiosa, then himself, with speculation that Max disliked profoundly. “The odd man out. Presumably the suborned assassin. I’d dearly love to hear what the Arbiter says when you deliver it. That would set the seal on the affair, for Gastown.”

“Have Furiosa pretend to be dead and delivered, you mean?” asked Toast. “Overhear what the Arbiter says to the successful killer?”

“You understand me perfectly, Knowing. Then, we snap the Arbiter up. Without the least loophole for him to squirm through.”  

Furiosa demanded, “If we do this, you’re getting the Arbiter and Gastown. What’s in it for us?”

“What do you want?”

Toast jumped in. “The same thing us former Wives got from Furiosa – more say when decisions get made, tomorrow. And amnesty for the outsiders who helped us, like the assassin, and some of the Gastown street people.” The other Council members present nodded.

“Done and done,” said the Jade.

Max’s gut settled, a touch.

Cheedo went up next to Toast. “I’m worried. The Arbiter will have those flamethrower schlangers with him! He had them at dinner, even. They could hurt Furiosa and Max really badly.” Toast winced. Furiosa tensed and glanced at him. Max shrugged. Getting out of there with his name unspoken would’ve been too good.

Furiosa said, “If we staged it by the Rig full of water, someone could get them with the hose.”

The History Man perked up. “I spent all day being shown the refinery works. Do you know, not all the pipes in this place carry oil? Some of them have water. Filthy stuff from the refining, but…”

There was an instant’s hopeful, busy silence.

Then, they all began talking at once.

Max settled back, lowering the rifle. Pretty soon, what he’d expected the minute the Jade walked in was going to happen. Someone was going to tell him what to do.

* * *

Close to dawn, Max was doing his best to be a grim silhouette in a noisome utility area of the pipe works. Gastown was luxurious enough to have rubbish bundled to one side of this wide lane, awaiting recycling. A few meters down, parked vehicles were lining up. Max stood over a crumpled heap that he had draped in a soaked black robe. He’d been here before, a paid killer with success bleeding beside him. It had been part of his toolkit for survival. Until the deaths for and against him built up and began to replay in his nightmares, something like the scene he had set for the Arbiter.

Standing over the supposed corpse of the woman who was, unspoken, everything to him.

Furiosa was a good deceiver. Still and heavy since they’d left Organic’s, not a twitch of her lips as they’d set the scene. The Gastown pipes and smokes kept the desert’s night chill at bay. Hopefully the water would chill her down enough to finish passing as a corpse.

To keep from giving the game away, Max had had to barter with a messenger using one of his own precious belongings. Persuading someone local and sane-looking to set aside the Amnesty revels had cost him a good knife. As he was wondering if the Gastowner had decided to risk breaking a deal with a scav during the Amnesty, a scanning enforcer came into view, poking his flamethrower in front of him. He surveyed the scene, then stepped back, returning with two more figures: a second enforcer and the Arbiter.

The gray man, Gastown’s Voice and Law, strode up to him with the same peerless confidence the Jade had shown. He, too, was a tired man, in no mood to break out any rhyming. “I thought you’d failed. The Imperator was around and about after her duel long enough to start a range of wild rumors.”

Max shrugged. “Once I was on her, she robed up, ran through the pipe works. Knew she’d try to get here.” He gestured down at the parked vehicles: the Rig was amongst them. “She did.” Max held up Furiosa’s mechanical arm.

The Arbiter snapped, “That’s not the Imperator.”

Max crouched, glanced up significantly, and yanked back the robe. Furiosa was twisted in a deep puddle by a leaking wastewater pipe. Lying on her right side, her exposed stump arm and face were smeared with soot and blood.

“Dead,” Max grunted, sweating. It was his only lie, so far.

“And this the bleeding business.” The Arbiter leaned down to look closer, and lifted her right arm. When he released her, the limb dropped heavy to the greasy sand slurry.

“Tch! The indignity. I can’t blame you for a Wasteland grudge made manifest. The body’s worth your fee. Your story is also…most useful. Consider your favoured trader status sealed.” The Arbiter surveyed the picture before him, then snapped his fingers at one of the enforcers. “Make a note, repair here. They’ll be tapping it for bootleg water otherwise. Then straighten her out, before rigor mortis sets in.”

Max lowered the hand holding Furiosa’s arm, tucking it into his jacket.

The Arbiter looked up. With a grim smile, one patient predator to another, he said, “We all like our trophies. However, legally, that arm has already been judged part of the Imperator’s body. I need it for tomorrow. Your compensation awaits.” He held out a Before-time artefact, a flat golden rectangle, some kind of card. “Guard it with your life: this is no normal guzzoline token.”

Max reached out to take it, and then looked up. “Water? The fuck?” he said, doing his best to sound surprised.

The Arbiter also flinched, feeling stray drops, peering up himself. “That leak –“

That was the last thing he said before brown water hailed down. As he sputtered, Max short-circuited. Being drenched triggered a bad Citadel memory amongst his brain’s tripwires. He gasped and thrust at enemies who weren’t there for valuable seconds, before collecting himself.

Three gray fighters had slid down with the deluge, ignoring Max to engage the Arbiter and his enforcers. Then Furiosa reared up, sending water flying with a snarling cry, and sent her boot into the Arbiter’s gut. Behind Max, one of the rubbish bundles seemed to explode into an angry Gastown War Boy with a machete, flowing around Furiosa to seize the Arbiter by the throat.

An angry howl pierced the pipes. “Arbiter, you pipesucker, you didn’t ask me to take down the Imperator! Thought I couldn’t handle her? Nek’Minute’s got the word on you!” Casually, with his free hand, Nek’Minute impaled one of the incoming enforcers on his machete. The other enforcer raised his hands and promised information, letting the gray guards take him. It was done. For once, the Arbiter, soaked, panting, face a rictus of pain, was speechless.

One of the vehicles down the way, a limousine reminiscent of the first half of the People Eater’s old ride, opened its doors. “All these impatient people,” chided the Jade, staying well back from the filthy melee. “Including yourself, Arbiter. After all the information I shared with you. The Worksman agreed enough to trigger the pipes on our behalf. Such a rigid man, he’s dismayed that you broke rules.”

Nek’Minute shook the Arbiter with relish. “Now you’ll follow them! The rules you made for Gastown.”

The Arbiter’s rictus face changed to a terrible smile. He managed to say, “Giving me a chance? Sporting of you.”

“No chance! No way! You’re an old man,” Nek’Minute said. Max sensed doubt creeping behind his aggression.

The Jade clapped her hands. “Boys! Time to recycle the rubbish. Stow the Arbiter in the interrogation center, Restraint Option X. There will be further discussions.” She turned and eyed the seething Furiosa with satisfaction. “I thought that went well, didn’t you?”

Soaked and twice as grimy as usual, Furiosa had to cough with a rattle before replying. “Well for you. You’d better keep your side of the bargain.”

“Oh, Gastown will. It amused me to set your injured War Boys in the People Eater’s former chambers. There’s no greater luxury in the Wasteland, trust me. The others are waiting where you told them.” Max saw a familiar face with a pointed chin peering out of the Rig, another one with a fall of dark hair leaning behind her, smiling enough to light up Gastown’s garbage lane. Moon-white War Boys emerged around the Rig’s edges.

“Shall we proceed to the Establishment?”

“I have to settle here.” Furiosa gestured at Max.

“Of course. I’ll leave you two escorts, for when you’re done.” The Jade sniffed with distaste, looking pointedly at the rubbish, then at Max. Max began to cheer up. Between his breaking the deal to assassinate Furiosa, and freezing in the fight, the Jade probably thought he was a Wasteland loser. A nobody. He might fade back into the Wastelands yet.

They watched the Gastown contingent progress away. When they were out of sight and hearing, Furiosa sent the escort down ten meters, too.

Her voice was low. “I’m supposed to be bartering with you for sparing me. What sounds good?”

“Have Organic branded and inked by Gastown?”

It was good to laugh with her, again, sharing their appalling humor. As Furiosa trailed off into coughing, Max managed, “Sorry.”

Furiosa started. “For what? You saved my life, saved the Ace and two War Boys, and brought the Arbiter down.”

“Organic. Not being reliable. Being mad.”

“Reliable hasn’t been a crew characteristic this trip,” she said, sharply. Furiosa took pause, cradling her stump in her living hand, vulnerable as he’d ever seen her while standing. “I want to ask you to stick with us tomorrow. I shouldn’t. You have your own reputation out here, in Gastown and the Wasteland. Better than mine, it sounds like. You were at the Court.”

“They yell shit at everybody, watching the fights,” Max said.

“You were in the Wasteland.”

“Wasteland never tells the truth if there’s a better story.”

Furiosa swayed on her feet. “I raided for the Immortan. Citadel people don’t know what that means, a lot of them. That I burned the Wasteland down! You out of all of them, you have to understand. It means that four thousand days ago, I would have been the one to bring you in as a blood bag.”

That hit. Hard. Max heard himself saying, “Me? Then? Would’ve brought you to the Arbiter as a dead body.”

He’d gotten his own back, by the way Furiosa’s eyes tightened. Suddenly, she clawed for the straps of her prosthetic, even though she wasn’t wearing it. When her hand hit plain fabric, her face softened strangely. She almost whispered, “People that used us are having their revenge on us. Even though they’re not here. I needed you to know about the raids, from me. Not from some Gastown voice.”

They’d both been used, by others and by Gastown, for what they’d become to survive. “Are you sorry?”

Her face was anguished bafflement. “How could I not be?”

Max knew plenty that weren’t. “Then it’s actions. Like you said.” Like she’d shown earlier, with her physical trust on the Court, with her kiss, with following him into the dank laneways of Gastown and playing dead at his feet.

Furiosa remained far from him, locked in anguish. “The Jade showed Toast the old ledgers here with my raiding supplies. She knows what I did, down to the last bullet. We’re still having it out.”

For once, Max had something. “Have her talk to History. The old guy was on my back about – wait. Toast. Does she get to leave Gastown with you?”

Furiosa shifted to pure worry. “I never found out.”

That did it. “I’ll stick with you.” He wasn’t sure what he could do, if Toast had bartered herself away. If there was one thing he knew about, it was being used, and fighting back.

“I’ll have to tell Gastown we’ve recruited you.”

So much for being a safely written-off nobody. Max forced a nod. “Mph.” He handed Furiosa her arm, picked up the sodden black robe, and wrung it out. It wasn’t much, against the eyes of Gastown. But it was something.

He couldn’t find the golden guzzoline card anywhere. As he walked away with Furiosa, back to their crew, feeling his car key chafing inside a soggy pocket, its absence was almost reassuring. Something had to suck, or he wasn’t alive in the Wasteland.


	14. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Citadel-Gastown negotiations finally take place. Furiosa stands firm, Toast knows her worth, and information wants to be free.

Toast had woken up in their smoke-stained quarters feeling reasonably good. It was almost noon: early, for Gastown. Finally, they were going to wrap up the negotiations between the Citadel and Gastown.

Cheedo accepted Toast’s vest to wear over her white, bloodstained shift. She was more concerned that Furiosa’s well-worn clothes had been so soaked that they were still damp. Cheedo patched together a passable outfit for her, borrowed War Boy trousers and Toast’s scarf repurposed into something shirt-like. Furiosa was more absorbed in trying to get her prosthetic arm to stop making a whining noise. As they picked at bean bars, Furiosa asked Toast, abruptly, “Is the Jade forcing you to stay here, or are you coming back?”

“I didn’t mention it to the Jade – so that it wouldn’t come to mind.” Toast said. She looked around at Cheedo, Max, and two War Boys, Gearshift and Toe-Out. Max made an approving noise around a mouth full of crushed beans.

Toast said, “Nobody mention it at negotiations in case we still need to use it. Oh, call me the Knowing in front of Gastown people? That’s my name here, now.”

“You’ve got a name here,” Furiosa repeated. She fractured her bean bar into more pieces. Max stopped chewing.

Toast didn’t blame them. This batch of bean bars was particularly dry. “What about the raids? Can we use our extra leverage to shut those down?”

“I need to ask the Ace.” Furiosa had stood, with a cough. “I’ll go talk with him now, get him up to the penthouse.” It wasn’t a yes or a no. They all began to move.

Half an hour later, Toast looked around at the complete Citadel group in the Establishment’s creaking Tower elevator. They weren’t the composed diplomats who had stepped down from the Rig two days ago. Furiosa and Gearshift were at the ready if the Ace, injured twelve hours ago, keeled over. The History Man was relaxed about being down to his loincloth. Toast glimpsed his shoulder blade: _WWI-1915-Gallipoli-Anzacs-empire-sacrifice-trauma._ There was no way he could have inked that himself. It had to have been the History Woman – Miss Giddy.

Max was with them, openly. Toast wanted to be happy about this, but he had refused any War Boy garments, and the smell coming off of his half-dry clothing could take down the Gastown atmosphere in a fair fight. When they wrangled themselves out of the elevator, they found themselves facing the full slate of Gastown negotiatiators: the Worksman, the Jade, and Nek’Minute backed by Munter.

Nek’Minute stopped them before they could proceed. “Just been made full Warlord for Gastown. What’s the scav doing up here?”

Furiosa said, “He’s ours, now. Talk to him like he’s me.”

Nek’Minute gave Max the eye, frowning. Cheedo distracted him by asking, “Are you the new Voice for Gastown?”

Today, the Jade’s veils were the same gray as the uniforms of the elite fighters who lined the room like servants. She said, “Gastown will have another Voice shortly. There are several contenders, and pitting them against each other will be useful. For now, we are the Law. Collectively. Knowing, do come and sit by me.” Not wanting to offend, Toast went. Behind her, Furiosa’s arm whined, triggered by some movement.

When they were all seated, the Jade sat back expectantly. Cheedo said, “Thank you for meeting with us of the Citadel to negotiate today. For our side the first speaker is the Knowing.”

Toast was happy to bring it. “Our first intention is to confirm our changed terms of trade, as outlined yesterday. The Citadel proposes a fifteen percent reduction in our guzzoline and a thirty percent reduction in non-guzz chem from Gastown. In return Gastown will reduce their Citadel produce acquisition by ten percent.”

“Possible,” the Jade allowed. The Worksman stared into space, calculating with his mind, and nodded.

Toast flicked her eyes at Cheedo. Cheedo said, “If it’s easier for the Citadel to travel through this area, we would be able to send more water here.”

“Sweets from the sweet. Do elucidate,” said the Jade.

“Excessive syllables to vex the Wasteland? That’s my cue,” said the History Man. “The Citadel seeks regular, confirmed, and supported ability to travel further south than the former Triumverate has previously ventured. Support is where Gastown comes in. You and your guards let Citadel travellers and those they vouch for through your southern border. Your industrial side can make travel easier with some water well drilling a few hundred kilometers here and there out into the Wasteland.”

“What’s your offer?” asked the Jade.

Toast named a quantity of water. “That’s a twenty percent increase per seven days. We’re serious.”

Furiosa added, “And the Citadel not getting our fuel from the wildcatters.” Nek’Minute, in his seat, spread himself wide and slid his machete onto the table.

“Gastown never drills without direction, only where the maps show resources. Risk and cost,” the Worksman said.

History said, “Who’s asking you to? The old settlements your Triumverate destroyed were there because they had wells. Look at your raid records and you’ll know where to go.”

Nek’Minute had moved up to tapping the machete by its edge against the table. “About them wildcatters. Last we talked, Imperator, sounded like we had some raids of our own planned. Three raids as the price of Gastown fighters backing you up.”

Furiosa and the Ace exchanged a look. The Ace nodded. Toast held her breath, not knowing whether to watch Furiosa or the tabled machete. “We refuse to compromise on the military actions. Your escaped slaves and wildcatters – not only won’t the Citadel help, but we want you to leave them alone. Going against them is a waste of our resources.”

“What about the Sun Touchers?” asked Nek’Minute.

“They’re the real deal. I bet your War Boys need Citadel info to raid Citadel deserters,” said the Ace, with a hint of his steel-toothed smile.

“We want more confirmation, and once we have it, we will fight them with Gastown.” Furiosa was cool and stern.

“Fight them, how?”

“If they’re what you say, with everything we’ve got,” said the Ace.

Nek’Minute lifted the machete, bringing both Furiosa and Max to their feet. He only tossed it into the air, and caught it, teeth bared happily. “We’re gonna do war!” Max slumped back down with a resentful glare at the warlord.

The Jade flashed her eyes. “We haven’t said yes to any of this yet. Except the war, thank you very much, Nek’Minute. Assuming we say yes to this Citadel folly, it is on Gastown to feed and defend the drillers. I propose a five percent reduction in Citadel produce, instead of ten.”

Toast said, “Seven percent, because we’re dropping the chem so much.”

The Jade flashed back, “I’d go as far as twelve percent, if we got your Knowing for Gastown in the bargain.”

Cheedo gasped with dismay. History steepled his hands in front of his mouth. Max leaned forwards; there was a flick of his wrist somewhere that made Nek’Minute pay attention. Toast looked at Furiosa, and caught the secretive expression she had once worn as their Vault guard, on the cusp of desperate action – directed at her.

“Well, I’m sticking with the Citadel. So, seven percent.” Furiosa turned a breath into a cough.

The Jade stayed cool. “Very well, young Arbiter. Perhaps it’s better so. After what we are doing with the last one.” Toast felt herself curdle at the comparison, but the table relaxed.

“What’s going down with the Arbiter?” asked the Ace.

“He has been found in violation of Gastown law. Since we have, lately, settled power imbalances with violence, it seemed fitting to sentence the Arbiter to compete in tonight’s Thunderdome.”

“We all get to see him get piked,” said Nek’Minute. “Or knifed. Or chainsawed.”

The Jade stroked her gray veils. “Oh, he’ll have his chance…against the most desperate killers in the Wasteland. Citadel, Gastown, I believe we have a trade agreement. All in favour?” Most of the table raised their right hands. The Ace nudged Max, and he raised his hand, too. The Jade repeated the terms a final time. Two masked scribes sent their pens whispering across cannibal vellum, creating two copies in minute, crabbed writing.

“While we’re here, thought we might recruit some fighters for the Citadel,” said the Ace. “Got a lot of violent men, Gastown does. We need some of ‘em. I know how to wrangle them. We can feed them. What do you say?”

Nek’Minute said, “Could use more ourselves. One reason to do war with the Imperator, and get some of her smarts.”

“Got an idea that doesn’t touch your War Boys or Polecats.” The Ace stated his proposal.

Nek’Minute said, “You want _them_? Ptch! Take them! This time.”

“I’m amused. And we are in need of a Voice for the Thunderdome. I don’t want to give any of the Gastown contenders ideas by offering it to them so soon. Cheedo, if you take that on as the Citadel’s Voice, the Citadel can have this deal.” The Ace looked crestfallen. Furiosa half-rose from her chair again, then paused, thinking.

“Don’t make her!” said Max.

“It’s crazy, the Thunderdome,” the Ace agreed.

“But it helps if I do. We can get what we need.” Cheedo asked, “You’ve all been doing hard things. Was there a Voice last night? For the duel?”

Furiosa glowered, “Yes, the Arbiter. And he shaped the fight through it.”

“And if our Voice does it, she can shape it our way,” Toast went on. “Last night, the Arbiter was pretty far away and safe, for somebody getting other people to kill each other.”

Cheedo turned to the Jade. “I’ll do it.”

“In style.” The Jade turned to Furiosa. “Whatever you can extract for the Citadel from one Thunderdome is worth it. I see how the Citadel turns on your word, Imperator. Council or no. Speaking of blood, we are ready to sign.” History was somehow in front of both copies, scanning them quickly, then passing them to the detail-obsessed Worksman.

Yet again, Toast noted, less than an hour in the Jade’s company had Furiosa tense with subsumed rage. She was nonetheless extracting the Citadel seal from her pocket. The Worksman released the agreements. One scribe placed a smear of white paraffin wax on the right corner of each document. Furiosa pressed the Citadel’s new seal: a skull surrounded by a wreath of leaves. The other scribe placed a hot blob of dark bitumen on the left corners, and, after fanning this for a moment, the Jade pressed down the Gastown seal with its oil well.

The deal was done.

Once the seals were cold, the meeting broke down quickly. The Citadel wasn’t much for small talk afterwards. Toast had heard that the Arbiter was being held in the tower level immediately below them, and she suspected that the Jade was going to taunt him while she could.

Sure enough, the Gastown negotiators descended first, leaving the Citadel party to the view from the top of Gastown for ten minutes until the lift returned. Max and the Ace had come together to try and tell Cheedo what the Thunderdome was like. This wasn’t going very well, with the Ace talking over Max constantly, and Cheedo looking increasingly worried.

Toast eased up to Furiosa, feeling tongue-tied. “The raids. It means a lot to me, that we don’t have to do them. I didn’t think of telling them to not do them, either. Thank you. You want this back, right?” She offered the blued-steel pistol handle first, as Furiosa had offered it to her.

Furiosa said, “Do you remember the time in the Vault, when I told you, you didn’t want to be like me: that you could be better?”

“You were talking to Capable, that time.”

“I meant all of you. I’m seeing it, here. If I was like you Sisters…” Furiosa paused, then took the pistol back, with a hint of a smile. “I’d let you keep this.” She clicked the chamber open. “Who’d you shoot?”

“A Gastown laneway.” Furiosa started to laugh, and it turned into another cough. Out of the corner of her eye, Toast caught a white flash. Cheedo and the Ace had changed places, and she was now fussing over him. Cheedo caught her eye and started pointing at the Ace. “I think Cheedo’s saying we should get the Ace back down. He’s not looking good.” Furiosa looked, saw, and gave Toast a nod before going over there.

Their signed Gastown agreement was still on the table. Toast picked it up. “Who’s supposed to take this?”

Somebody by the window laughed, briefly. “I think you’ll do splendidly.”

“Are you looking at the geology?” Toast asked the History Man.

“Not with this atmosphere. The fire and smoke brings to mind your Anti-Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the Jade.”

Toast tried to connect the two. “You didn’t tell them about the twenty-five oldyears, for Gastown.”

“No, I didn’t, did I? No chance they’d listen. Not until they’ve had their teeth in this place for a while. Wordburger: I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.”

He lowered his voice. “Your Imperator is strong enough to listen. I was relieved when you sent her down to tell the Ace the other raids were off.”

“I didn’t send her…”

“Didn’t you? Wordburger: And in her was found the blood of prophets.”

The elevator was rattling open. Toast didn’t have time to decode him. She said, directly, “We’re both about to be busy. I need to know. If I learned some of the History from you, would I have to be a History Person?”

He looked up at her with his most open smile. “Not with a name like yours, Knowing. Wordburger: Information wants to be free. Shall we descend?”

Shortly, she and Cheedo and Max were back in the Citadel quarters. The others kept going down. Neither of the Sisters were up for a look at the People Eater’s former rooms. The Ace had said they had much better security and access, and he wished the rest of them would shift. Furiosa said they’d manage. Max said one look was enough for him. “There’s a cage in there.” He hadn’t said much else, since. He scanned their current quarters, gave the Sisters a nod, then sat down to finish chewing through Furiosa’s unfinished bean bar fragments.

“Wherever they put you for the Thunderdome, I’ll be there with you,” Toast said to Cheedo.

Cheedo looked pleased, if perplexed. “They’re giving me a guard.”

“Watch the people walking around Gastown – lots of them are paired up. Besides, I heard the crowd at Furiosa’s duel. You heard Max say that was nothing to the Thunderdome. This is going to be insane. I won’t talk, I’ll just be there.”

“Should we have Furiosa, too?”

Toast shook her head. “Not after the duel.” She didn’t know what the Gastown crowd would scream at Furiosa. It could definitely stay out of their history.

Firm after bossing around War Boys for a day and a half, Cheedo declared, “You can be at the Thunderdome with me if you do something nice with your hair first. Max was right, earlier, it’s all wrong.”

“My hair has always looked terrible. It’s supposed to!”

Cheedo suggested, “We could make it really short? Like Furiosa’s?”

Toast shook her head and admitted, “I was growing it out to hide my brand…” She didn’t add: now that the Immortan was dead.

Cheedo clapped her hands. “Then I know what to do! Come on, let’s go to the Jade’s quarters. She said she’d have something for me to wear.”

“Do we have to – oh, all right.” Toast sighed. She’d have to deal with the Jade for a long time. Now that the Jade had Organic, that would buy her a few extra years, at least. Toast decided to ask about borrowing a flamethrower to help guard Cheedo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers  
>  _I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow_ – The New Testament, Book of Revelation/the Apocalypse, 18:7 
> 
> _And in her was found the blood of prophets_ – The New Testament, Book of Revelation/the Apocalypse, 18:23 
> 
> _Information wants to be free_ – Marshall McLuhan


	15. The Gastown Thunderdome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheedo subverts the Thunderdome for the Citadel! But with Gastown justice on the table, the mob still gets their dyin' time. EXTRA VIOLENCE WARNING for depicting a multi-competitor Thunderdome.

When they were ready to enter the space for the Thunderdome, Toast was still feeling light and strange with her new haircut. She now had close-cut, shaped sides and a thick stripe of hair down the center that could be worn flat or standing. The falling back of the stripe covered her brand. It wasn’t like anyone was going to look at her, anyway, next to Cheedo.

Cheedo’s hair was piled high, and she was wearing a silver-shimmer gown, salvage from the Before-time in the Jade's hoards. The dress smelled like the rat cage from earlier, and Cheedo said it was as scratchy as a sandstorm. But, wearing it, Cheedo glimmered like the spirit of chrome itself. She had a cream leather jacket to go over it, the left shoulder pricked and weighted with chrome spikes and chains. Toast was glad Cheedo could turn up the jacket’s collar against the crowd – and the contestants.

The sole entry to the Thunderdome was a dim metal box of a room, where ten Wasteland brawlers were penned. The base rules of the Gastown Thunderdome were, it was said, stolen wholesale from a bartering post on the other side of the Salt. Contestants vied against each other for limited weapons until all but one were dead. To entertain the mob, the Gastown rules pitted a range of contestants against each other, instead of the traditional pair. Those who walked through the steel door to try the savage odds were both fierce and desperate. Guards fenced them off as Cheedo and Toast went through, and two War Boys followed to wait for them. Toast lifted the handle of her borrowed flamethrower. Their passage interrupted three fighters baiting a latecomer.

“I don’t know about this,” Cheedo whispered. “They’re not like –“

“You know Max did it once. He told us. Give these ones a chance and if they’re half as good as he is, they can help.” Toast tried to sound confident.

Cheedo gazed down at Toast with a new gravity. “I wish I could believe that more after Gastown.” She took a little breath. “Here I go!”

Their tallest guard stepped out with her, starting to rev a chainsaw that he held. A man on the side, covered in speakers and lights, corralled Cheedo and gave her a microphone, having her breathe into it, showing her how to turn it on and off. “Tell the Jade I helped you,” he urged.

In Gastown, the Thunderdome was set at the heart of the pipe works, where pipes and tech and ramps made a space like a tall, wide cage. They were on the inside. On the outside was all Gastown, from flat on the ground to clambered up top – and more. Wastelanders packed any spaces that weren’t taken by Gastown masks. They could reach their arms in, all of them, to help or hinder the contestants as they tried to climb the pipe grid and reach a paltry few weapons hanging above. At the very top were mirrored gaslights, and beneath them, when she walked out, Cheedo shone.

The packed crowd greeted her with howls of enthusiasm and rhythmic hammering on the pipes. Their chainsaw guard went to her left and raised the running saw, threateningly. Toast leapt by him to the other side and gave the sandy floor of the Thunderdome a stroke with the flamethrower. On her side, the crowd pulled their arms back to the safe side of the pipes. A shiver went through her. That was more fun than it should be.

Cheedo’s light voice was amplified, like the illumination from the mirrored lights above. “People of Gastown and the Wasteland. I am the voice of the Citadel, on behalf of the Gastown Executive Board. Welcome to Thunderdome.” As she had been advised, she stayed quiet to let the crowd scream themselves out. Insults and loathesome compliments and plain noise wove together, sound as filthy as the Gastown air. Toast flicked the flamethrower again, as if she could burn it all clean.

“This is the Gastown Thunderdome – and the Gastown tradition has been – warriors with no weapons enter tonight. They claim what they can from the chains and they fight. What happens then?”

The mob replied, “ONE MAN LEAVES!”

“Do you want to see them?”

Gastown screamed in reply.

The touch of rhyming seemed to be going over well. Cheedo had admitted that it made it easier to remember everything. She turned and opened her arms as the fighters were herded out. Toast turned, as well. The Wasteland winds had rolled up ten fighters. Toast widened her eyes when she saw one contestant was a woman, dark-skinned like herself. Another was a Buzzard, one of the aggressive, diseased cannibals who deviled the Wasteland. She stepped back in revulsion.

“They came to risk it all. You came to see them fall,” Cheedo announced. She lifted her left hand towards the contestants. Toast braced herself. This was it. This might be the night the pipes got shattered.

“You’re brave. You’re strong. You have nothing to lose. You thought that meant death, but this once, you can choose. Double Amnesty inside this cage tonight. Leave the Thunderdome – to help the Citadel fight.” She took a deep breath and dropped the rhymes. “Two choices! One chance. Choose now! Fight in the Thunderdome to win the prize if you survive. Or walk out with us right now as someone to be, with somewhere to go, a guard and fighter for the Citadel.”

The crowd, on the edge of losing their entertainment, rattled the pipes again – and their cries got louder as the first fighter walked over to them. The Buzzard made a complex obscene gesture and went to stand under a dangling weapon. Toast’s heart fell as the woman, stalking separately, joined him. But another was going as close to Cheedo as he could, followed by a third.

Soon it was clear that six of them were walking out, while four were staying. Guards cleared the reprieved men away, leaving the crowd and the fighting four. The mob weren’t as loud as they could be, saving their bile to call the departing fighters cowards and scavs. They knew what was coming next. If it wasn’t, Toast doubted they’d have gotten away with their offer.

Cheedo gave it to them. “There is one more for the Thunderdome tonight: the former Voice and former Law of Gastown, the Arbiter.” Cheedo’s painstakingly memorized legal statement about which statute of the Gastown Executive Board Code of Conduct measures he had violated was unheard in the mob roar of bloodthirsty ecstasy. Shortly, it settled into a sustained, approving call. _Chrome, chrome, chrome!_

“All Thunderdome contenders are eligible for the Gastown prize: a loaded bike and a year’s worth of guzz for it. For the last survivor.” A mirror-magnified light hit the cycle on show at one end of the cage, framed by identically masked Gastown girls. It was a sickening parody of the Citadel’s plenty and, thought Toast, the Immortan’s dreams.

A hook and chain reeled down before them. Their guard hung the warmed-up chainsaw on the hook. It zipped up to hang tantalizingly, three meters up: a weapon for the claiming by the fighters. Two other weapons hung at a similar height, chosen with Gastown irony. A machete, and the stockwhip from the night before.

Cheedo took heart from the crowd’s enthusiasm. “When the Arbiter enters, after the sirens blow, the Thunderdome begins! Tonight both the best and the worst man wins.” They liked that, and called her _chrome, chrome, chrome_ again to walk her out. Toast almost felt grateful to them.

Her heart plunged when she realized they had to go past the Arbiter. Inside the metal passage box, a guard was undoing his arms behind his back. The Arbiter’s blazing eyes pinned Toast. “Toys of the Imperator! A pretty show you put on. You’re above them all right now, you think. You think you own the mob. But they’ll drag you down. Watch me and know your deaths.” He was shoved out, and the metal door slammed. Out in the Thunderdome, sirens blared. The fighting had begun.   

Toast, Cheedo, and several guards, their own War Boys and the chainsaw man, remained with the fighters who had chosen life. Furiosa had said, after Max had brought the Vuvalini survivors in, that she wished there were more of him. The Ace had said, half-seriously, “Shame you can’t scoop up the Thunderdome lot,” and their plan was born. Toast wasn’t sure about this, because not one of these fighters was like Max at all. They were older, younger, paler, darker. One of them looked around with a perpetually open mouth and mild muddy eyes. Another had a consuming gaze that would give the History Man and the Arbiter combined a run for their money. A third was unreadable, one walking body mod from head to toe.

Toast asked what they were called. “Okay, Battler, Moo, Jindi, Friend of the Devil, Ballard, and, uh, Oxidative Damage. I’m the Knowing, and I’m on the Citadel Council. I’m a veteran of the Fury Road, and I know what it is to do something wild because you want things to be better.” These carefully chosen words won a few grunts from the men. Seemed like Max wasn't the only closed-mouthed Wasteland wanderer. “If you want to get out of Gastown alive, you’d better stick with us. Want to get on at the Citadel? Deal clean, like you've been hired as mercenaries.” That got acknowledgement from all of them.

Moo said, “Work for ‘Mperator?”

“For all of us. We’re going up to tell the others from the Citadel who you are. We need to watch this. We’ll collect you after it’s over. This is to get you started. Citadel water. Drink and we’re allies.” Two War Boys handed bottles around.

Battler said, “Smeg. A liter.”

Ballard drank first. “To our new gynotopian overlords,” he said, giving his bottle a lift in Toast’s direction. The others followed. Two of them started to laugh, wild in their relief.

“Let’s go up,” said Cheedo, sounding hoarse. “I’m really tired, all of a sudden.”

They were warded through the crowd, up another lift, and into a balcony bordered by fat pipes. The Jade was the prime figure there, in a chair, flanked by Nek’Minute and the Bullet Farm Captain. Lookout was out on the balcony edge, close to where the History Man peered out. Furiosa stood a pace behind the Jade’s chair, in shadows. Max was sitting at her feet, wrapped in the hooded black robe. There was just room for Toast and Cheedo beside Furiosa. Cheedo removed her strange, high shoes.

Furiosa didn’t look away from the evolving fight as she spoke to Toast and Cheedo. “That could be me. I know it’s never going to be you.” They all glanced down at Max. It had been him, once.

“Our old friend is doing rather well,” said the Jade, watching the Arbiter.

“Mhm. Still alive. Ooh, up on the grid. Crowd in the mood to help? Nope, all he got is a shove back in. Dealt with as done by!” Nek’Minute laughed. He said to Toast. “See, the fighters, they don’t think he’s a contender. Last man standing, though, has to take him down to win.”

Toast leaned back to ask, “What are those two doing?” The two more ordinary men in the ring had pulled each other off to one side.

The History Man said, “Rock-scissors-paper, of all things.” They did three rounds of the old hand game. Then, they raced to the middle of the Thunderdome ground. The loser gave the winner a heave up onto his shoulders. They swayed, two men high, and the winner grabbed the chainsaw. They tumbled apart. Immediately, the chainsaw holder turned to the man who had helped him and beheaded him.

The crowd roared, “Clean! Clean!”

Cheedo gasped. Toast had her hand over her mouth. Nek’Minute said, “One to gain the weapon, one to die fast and clean. Nice.”

Furiosa laughed, bitterly. “Clean dealing.”

Max muttered, “Chainsaw doesn’t mean he’ll win.”

The chainsaw-wielding man and the woman were now facing off. She had the machete, which was the same length as the chainsaw. This went on for some time. The Arbiter, outside the main melee, stripped the corpse in the sanded space of its belts and, weirdly, a shoe. He kept a keen eye on the dueling pair. When they got really exciting, he ducked off to one side.

The chainsaw roared against the machete, sparking. The two fighters were close enough that the chainsaw-wielder managed to get his foot between the woman’s boots. In the one moment when balance shifted, he brought the chainsaw down. The woman’s right arm fell away, sheared clean below the elbow, and there was a good cut in her right side, too. The crowd’s noise beat against them like a physical thing as she sank to her knees, bleeding out.

Toast whipped around to Furiosa - to find her inscrutable. The shadows had her, and her light-catching eyes were closed.

Below, the lash cracked. The Arbiter had acquired the whip and shed his gray robe. His right arm was as scarred as the side of his face.

Lookout was gaping. “How’d he get that?”

The Captain said, “That’ll show you. Never overlook anyone, son.”

The lash cracked, again. The chainsaw-wielder had been tired and injured by the fierce fight. He approached the Arbiter, cautiously, after retrieving the machete and sticking it in his belt. The Arbiter sent the whip directly at his half-masked face, and blood flashed.

“He’s going down fighting,” said Nek’Minute, with respect.

As the fighter raised his chainsaw before his face, the whip snapped back again to clip his ear. He let it happen – and followed the whip in on its slithering retreat to plunge the chainsaw into the Arbiter’s heart. Toast closed her eyes.

The chainsaw roared clear, then muffled, then stopped. “Tch! What a time for it to seize up!” said the Jade.

The winning fighter released the saw and stood back for the Arbiter’s collapse. The crowd, eerily, hushed as he went down.

Cheedo seized the moment. She leaned out, clinging to edge of the pipes, and screamed, “WITNESS!” The crowd took up the call.

“Witnessed!” roared Nek’Minute, joyously.

Furiosa and Max were both glazed and absent. Max looked up at Furiosa. She said, “Witnessed.”

The History Man had moved back as Cheedo advanced. His face had collapsed. He had never looked older. Toast gave his bare shoulder a touch. “Witnessed,” she said.

The crowd was crying out for the Thunderdome winner. Toast realized what they were calling. _Rider! Rider! Rider!_   The winner reached into his jacket and pulled out a string of amulets before strutting up to claim the prize from the masked women. He had been so ordinary without his helmet, his otherwise plain clothes dusty, she hadn’t realized this was one of the Rock Riders.

“Care for the Arbiter’s corpse, Imperator?” asked the Jade. “Perhaps you’d like his skull as an ornament for your Rig?”

Furiosa growled, “Those skulls on our vehicles are crew. Our people. We do it to honor them.”

“So the Arbiter’s out of the question. If you rescind the claim, Imperator, there will be some lucky beggars, tonight.”

"The Citadel rescinds."

The History Man gave Toast’s arm a tap and pointed at the carnage below, framed in its dying industrial cage. Toast saw his lips move, and had to lean in. He was saying, “A first lesson. Where must we go? We who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves?”

He answered his own question. “Wordburger: The place of crime. The place of horror. Also, the place of forgiveness.”

Toast replied, “This is definitely the first two. Where is the third?”

“It has never been here more than it was tonight. But it had to be chosen.”

The sirens drowned out the mob to close the Thunderdome.

“Come and see who chose,” said Toast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Max appeared in the Gastown Thunderdome in the third issue of the Mad Max comics series. He killed three people out of fourteen contenders, and was considered the winner. The Gastown Thunderdome changed the "two men enters, one man leaves" structure from _Mad Max:Beyond Thunderdome_ , warping it with additional contestants to create a bloodbath. 
> 
> Wordburger:  
> “The place of crime. The place of horror. Also, the place of forgiveness.” – From Helene Cixous’ eponymous essay on the theatre.


	16. Amnesty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Furiosa and Max dredge through what Gastown drilled up for them, and seal their reconciliation. 
> 
> Warnings for edge play and D/s smut. If you don't sail the Furiosa/Max ship, feel free to skip!

The Citadel used their new recruits as an excuse to leave the bloodstained Thunderdome venue as soon as possible. The Jade invited the tireless Cheedo to try on more of the Jade’s pre-veil wardrobe. Toast went to watch over her, asking if the tame rats were still around, too. The Ace and the other injured War Boys remained recuperating in the obscene luxury of the People Eater’s former quarters. Both spaces made Furiosa’s skin crawl. In the previous Citadel quarters, the History Man, with the well War Boys backing him up, was Telling the new recruits about the Citadel and drawing out their stories.

Furiosa knew she should be there, witnessing and encouraging, with Max as a feral-turned-ally. But by the ghastly end of the Thunderdome, she was as stiff and sharp-edged as her damaged mechanical arm. Max had emerged from his stony silence to say, “Should show you where I’ll be going. Need the car, though.” She had agreed immediately. She would have said yes to a tour of one of Gastown’s bordering garbage dumps, if it got her on the other side of the moat. Her head began to clear when they passed over the rickety Gastown bridge.

They stayed silent as they drove through the unquiet night. On the plains around Gastown, campers were gathered around bonfires. Passing between the roadway torches, Furiosa glimpsed bodies dancing or fighting, then a stage where giant shadows reared. She heard impromptu races in the distance, and recalled her reckless younger days. The brief time when fighting for the Citadel, and the rough War Boy revels afterwards, had felt like freedom. She’d learned hard reasons to distance herself from it, soon enough.

Eventually, the noise and torches fell behind them. Max finally spoke. “Followed?”

Furiosa looked back and scanned the plain. “No.”

He nodded, trusting her. He turned his car lights on at the last possible minute as they began to rise into some hills. More peaceful, slow driving followed. They were not on the highway that led back to the Citadel.

A cracked, clean-swept road emerged below their tires. Max pulled up to a checkpoint and pointed at a campfire nearby. “Back soon.” He returned followed by a dark man who looked over the car and gave a thumbs up. Max handed him a wrapped stack of Citadel bean bars. Furiosa bit back a protest at seeing him dispose of seven days’ rations. The man, in response, dragged out a light roadblock and placed it across the asphalt, just behind them. “It’s their place. The hill’s ours,” Max said. “Until dawn.”

Furiosa was reminded of their first night alone together, when she’d bargained to possess Max until dawn. Only eighteen days ago: if this sudden ride, like their last one, was an excuse to steal some intimacy, it would be their seventh time. She peered at Max in the dimness, trying to read him. His shadowed face had a tight mouth and a downturned brow. She kept her hand to herself.

When the road began to grow steep, he stopped. He held up a small, improvised-looking caltrop, then got out of the car to salt the road with handfuls of them. When he returned, they finished the angled ascent to a flat area. Max ground the car to a slow halt, then switched off the lights. They sat there for a while. For once, the Wasteland night was windless. The only sound was the soothing ticking of the cooling car engine.

After several quiet minutes, Max said, “Fucking Gastown.”

“Sphincters, the lot of them,” Furiosa agreed. They fell agreeably silent again.

Furiosa decided to get out and stretch. Before-time asphalt was grinding down to join sandstone, still warm from the hammering daytime sun. A blunt height of stone rose behind the parking flat. From the west, south, and southeast, cleaner air was flowing. Furiosa breathed deep.

Here, the night was clear and blue. A gibbous moon cast shadows. In the wide bar of stars the Citadel called the Motorway, the guiding constellation of the Tire Jack was bright. Furiosa dimly remembered learning other names for them, as a girl in the Green Place. They had slipped away from her, with so much else. She did remember, at close to three thousand days old, when the perpetually hazed skies had changed, growing harder and clearer. The stars were brighter, since, but the Wasteland heat had grown punishing, and rain was a memory.

Beneath the unshielded sky, she sensed Max cautiously leaving his car, behind her. He cleared his throat. “Uh. Not gonna scream, again?” She turned and saw he pointed at the spar of rock. “It echoes. They’ll think I’m killing you, down there.”

She shook her head. “Gastown was bad. We’ve been through worse.” Since their conversation after taking down the Arbiter had turned unexpectedly bitter, a question had been weighing her down, like a knife in its sheath. “So. If you were going to assassinate me…how would you have done it?”

He took out a pistol. Furiosa had chosen it from her small hoard of firearms for him, after their first night together. “Clean. Shot through the heart.”

“Even four thousand days ago?”

“Mph.”

“Medulla’s quicker,” she couldn’t help saying.

Max gazed over her shoulder, out into the night. “Talked once about the ones I didn’t save. Feeling them like ghosts.” He took a terrible breath. “Ones I kill myself, they stay, too.”

Involuntarily, Furiosa saw golden gaslight, the bridge of a freckled nose, and heard herself saying, _I killed her like I would have killed myself_. She twisted her head and blinked to return to the Wasteland night.

There, in wordless misery, standing on one of the blacker patches of the ground, Max was holding the pistol out to her.

An apology, repeated. For being unreliable.

An acknowledgment. That it had been crazy, suicidal, to make and break a deal with the Arbiter in Gastown.

A surrender. From one of the most dangerous men in the Wasteland.

Furiosa drifted up to him and took the pistol in her living hand. He was tense and still, darting eyes tracking her shadowed movements. He stayed where he was as Furiosa traced the muzzle along his cheek, his neck. She tilted it down to rest over his sternum.

By the time the metal was over his heart, they both shared a quick-breathed tremor.

She met his eyes.

Furiosa lifted the gun away. The sharp click of the safety echoed from the cliff. She held it out for him to reclaim. Saying, “I’m sorry, too. For everything Gastown dredged up.”

He lowered his face and sighed, his misery receding, somewhat.

When she inclined her head closer to him, he didn’t move away. Her voice went ragged. “Can I touch you again?”

Max answered wordlessly, rolling his face against hers. Their mouths met, hot and open, and Furiosa gently bit his lower lip, before probing into him with her tongue. The near musk of him began to revive her sense of smell, shut down after the days in Gastown. He reached up to begin undoing the buckles of her arm, and she turned to allow this.

The clothes Furiosa had on weren’t her clothes, her second skin, and for once it was a relief to strip them away. Max’s breath went fast in the moonlight as she bared herself. She let his rough hands go everywhere, knelt over his hips when he stroked her down onto their tangled clothes. Max seemed to find her scarred leanness above him more than enough, tonight. Soon, she shifted to mount him. It wasn't as difficult as it had been, the first time, after being closed off for so long. Furiosa had picked up, between the Sisters and the Vuvalini, that this was supposed to be the apex of desire. And it was good, it was warm and close, but it had been their tremors with deadly metal between them that unlocked her. She’d hold that gunfire spark to her and use it to raid herself, on his behalf.

Max interrupted her thoughts. He reached up and paused her caressing hand, pressing it down against his throat.

She went breathless once more. He remained her match, as warped out of true as she was. Neither of them was alone with what they were.

Furiosa responded by turning her hand into a half-collar around Max’s throat. He arced into the touch, slightly. Her blood seethed as she pressed the hand down, compressing his throat for an ecstatic moment without oxygen.

Max bucked under her like a started bike. Furiosa lifted the pressure, allowed him two desperate breaths, replaced it, and rode him like she was coursing through a storm. He gave himself up hard and fast, and she moved her hand to smother his mouth. They’d think she was killing him, down there, if that guttural groan echoed off the rocks.

She lifted herself away. The bitumen was pebbling her knees, even through their clothing. When Max went to slide his face down her body, she asked, “What about the car?” Max understood. His vehicle was a selfish machine, designed for one man’s survival, but that included a front seat where one half slid back and laid down, a secure rest spot for a Wasteland traveler. In short order, they were locked together there for the second half of their ride. Max slid down her, pricking her awakened skin with his stubble. He crammed his folded legs in the seat well to put his face where it belonged, between her legs. Furiosa folded one leg across his back, to pin him there for a good, long time.  

The moon’s fading found Furiosa with her heart slowing, sated, in the reclined front seat. Max was pulled up more, now, curled around her lower half, one muscled arm along her ferociously scarred left thigh. She had her one hand on the back of his tousled head, admiring him. Free of his blocky, sheltering clothes, his solid shoulders tapered to his lean hips. Furiosa’s fingers brushed down to his neck, against the thin rise of his Citadel brand. 

Max said, into her thigh, “Ain’t we a pair.”

Half-laughing, Furiosa asked, “What does that mean?” 

There was no reply, except his head and arm growing heavier against her leg. Max had fallen asleep.

* * *

For Max, being knocked into survival mode like that, as Furiosa reclaimed her trust in him with his own gun, then under her breath-stealing hand, had been ecstasy and release. Her body was as narrow and irresistible as a beckoning road, one he rode too quickly. Then, he’d lapped and cleansed his bitterness out of her, until only her pure alkali remained, and she’d knotted her one hand in his hair. He remembered hearing her laughing at something he said, with the rare, intimate laugh she used with the Sisters. Whatever he’d said to win that was smothered in his memory by a short bout of pure animal sleep.

When dawn came, Furiosa nudged him awake with her knees and slid out of the car. She was fully naked, for once, and it just about killed Max. If it wasn’t for her once-grilled left thigh, he couldn’t have coped with the strange balance of her, this Wasteland survivor with her fine-cut Before-time face. He drank her in while she dressed her lower half, stepping gingerly on the stones. She’d had boots, most of her life. Max dragged on his own trousers and helped with her upper half’s clothing. Her skin was amazingly clean-knit, muscles and ribs sliding evenly, her scars mostly elegant slices. When he’d re-fastened her leather waist brace, still damp in its seams after their shared soaking yesterday, she smiled at him in thanks.

Max felt himself twist at that, his heart cramping with the pain of wanting to remember, and return. They'd salvaged the one decent thing there was in Gastown for themselves: being mates. 

For all that his thoughts about her flowed, they went raw as blasted sandstone when he tried to say them. “You look good. I’ll, um. Be keeping to myself. Till I see you again.”

Her lips twitched. “Same here.” She cupped her truncated arm and brought out something else to trouble them. “With us going up against the Sun Touchers, you could come back and find me a half-life. Or somebody else might come out against me, wanting revenge for my raiding days. With napalm.”

Max considered the Jade and her veils, Gastown women and their masks, Furiosa’s own spirit, hot as fire, transforming as radiation. He settled on a shrug and a careless “Alive’s good.” She rewarded him with her second laugh, the brief, hard one.

Max finished fumbling his boots on. Shrugging into his jacket, he said, “Show you where I’m going.”

The road ahead drew his words out. “Gastown’s last border is there. The flames. You know what’s right behind it there. Go beyond that, it’s the wild wastes. That’s a big dry, not much there, till I hit the Hot Zone. Gets a bit crazy there, with the old city. The other side of that, through or around. That’s when I start scouting.” The way south didn’t look so bad at dawn, beneath skies the color of lost flowers. A few white birds zoned through the atmosphere. They were close to the Broken Coast. He peered out. “Can you see a gray-blue line, out there? That’s the sea.”

Furiosa gave herself a sightline with her hand. “It’s there. I never saw the sea, before.”

Max suppressed a shudder inspired by the last time he’d gone down to the oil-stained coast. “Don’t get any closer, up here. I’ll see what’s good down South.” He couldn’t believe he was still protecting her, but there he was.

“There’s something else up here. In the stone. They say it’s from before the Before-time.” He took them to the natural spar of red rock. The side abutting the Wasteland and Gastown curved, scoured clean by the post-nuclear sandstorms. A small wall of it faced them, with a natural sandstone shelf. Max pointed above the shelf. She went up to it, and paused, looking. The dawn light was hitting the stone so that all the details were picked out in shadow.

Furiosa drank in the detailed rock art for a long moment. Max went beside her. You could tell it was Before-time with the animals, the people climbing a tree like they were the leaves, the intricate diagrams. “Compared to these, the Immortan’s Skullmouth looks like an angry child did it,” Furiosa said. She reached up and touched the red sandstone beneath, spreading her hand, a connecting salute.

Anxiously, Max said, “Don’t hurt it. You’ll have the worst luck in the world.”

Furiosa left her hand there, gentle. “The History Man said that people have lived here for millions of days. That the ones who carved like this, they were complex people.” She paused, absorbed in thought and possibility.

This was what he got for bringing her a History Man. After having driven a silent, staring, too-like-him Furiosa away from the Thunderdome, he didn’t care how baffling she was, as long as she was alive again. Furiosa lifted her hand as the eastern sky began to lighten. The shifting air carried the refinery’s stink.

“Better go back down,” Max said.

As she went back to the car, Max looked east. There was Gastown fermenting on the plain below, burning against the dawn. The works began to belch smoke, black and unscrubbed, against the paling sky. A dry wind took it to taint the Wastelands around. The campsites surrounding Gastown were starting to shift for the end of the Amnesty, their dirty vehicles thirsty for fuel.

Max turned forwards to the compelling combination of his fast car and Furiosa, strapping on her mechanized arm at last. Maybe the ones who might take a road south, one day, people resilient and complicated enough to leave the Citadel, could give up things like that.

He couldn’t.

Max touched the stone where Furiosa had, to whisper, “Sorry.”

Furiosa was well ahead of him, like usual. He hustled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Motorway and The Tire Jack – Citadel interpretation of the Milky Way and of the Southern Cross constellation.
> 
> Gun play and breath play - WARNING: Kids, don't try this at home unless you've gone to BDSM workshops to learn properly about edge play and breath play. 
> 
> This interpretation of the Citadel and Gastown are set in Australia's mineral-rich Pilbara. The Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara is one of the most prolific and famous Australian Indigenous rock art sites in the world. Its history is darkened by the Flying Foam Massacre, in 1868, a series of raids which decimated the indigenous traditional owners of the area, the Jaburara, and by [ongoing disputes that seem to be related to the rock art being close to major oil and gas mining infrastructure](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-19/burrup-peninsula-archaeological-dig-world-heritage-hopes/6631322). It is the author's intent to depict this respectfully and to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and creators of the art.


	17. Wasteland Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Citadel contingent leaves Gastown, with bittersweet partings as Max takes his own road. For now…

Gastown was sending off the Citadel and their Rig, in the space before the bridge. In the hard afternoon light, Toast shielded her eyes with her hand to glare back at the Gastown crowd.

The mob made sense to her now. There were pairs and cliques of refinery workers, makers, enforcers, Polecats, War Boys, prostitutes, beggars, and miscellaneous lowlives. They had waited patiently, willing to be tolerant – so tolerant they’d watch your world of pain, if it was a good show. The Wastelanders in Gastown for the Amnesty stood out, dusty rather than greasy, wrapped instead of masked, often by themselves. The Aqua-Pepsi vendors and crispy cricket sellers were doing decent business.

Nek’Minute, the Gastown representative seeing them off, stalked around as Cheedo formally thanked Gastown for the trade and defense agreement. She still had the cream leather jacket, with more castoffs from the Jade beneath, a simple buckled dress and boots. When she was done, Nek’Minute did the rounds of the recruits and War Boys, ending with, “Don’t huff all that guzz at once, eh? Look after the Chrome, there.” He lifted his machete to History, standing on the ground, and the Ace, peering down from the Rig’s cab. “Old fellas.”

Toast also rated a machete salute. “You knew me when you saw me. Death waiting, Nek’Minute! Tell your Citadel about me, and I’ll say Citadel’s got the Knowing.”

“They’ll know about you. I’ll tell,” Toast promised.

Nek’Minute seized Furiosa’s hand, warlord to warlord. “Imperator. We’ll do some war we won’t forget. We’ll burn them down!”

Before Furiosa could reply, the sound of a Thunderdome weapon cut the air. The crowd turned. War Boys and new recruits alike reached for arms. Everyone was gazing at the start of the pipe works. At the highest near point, Toast saw the distinctive silhouette of a Rock Rider, standing perched. The Rock Rider lifted his arm with a whirl, and the sound cut the air again: the bullet-shot crack of a stockwhip.

To the War Boys and Toast, Furiosa said, “Hold fire.” After the whip crack, it was quiet enough that the simple words carried.

The Rock Rider cracked the whip a third time. Then, he shook his left fist in the air and leapt down, to be lost in the pipes.

“Wasteland defiance,” shrugged Nek’Minute. He spat, and roared at the crowd. “No laws broken! Keep it that way, or else – Nek’Minute!” He slashed the air with his machete.

One man in the front, leaning comfortably against another man, said, wryly, “Gotcha, Boss.” Enough amusement spread out from them to defuse the tension.

“Ready to go?” Toast asked. Furiosa inclined her head (after watching her wordless exchanges with Max, Toast was starting to understand them herself.) With a lift of her metal hand to Nek’Minute and the crowd, Furiosa went to take the driver’s seat in the Rig. She vanished behind one of the Rig’s replaced white banners. Only the front pair of banners were in place. The rest were wrapped around their dead War Boy, riding historic home in the Rig’s lookout.

Toast helped Cheedo up into the front passenger seat, then went to see about the recruits. Max had found a scav with a vehicle to hire as an extra for the Citadel run. For the ones that she thought were the three riskiest recruits, Toast had set the History Man to talk them into the vehicle. Each was entrusted with a bundle of the more valuable Gastown chem. Toast heard History saying, “I hear you, mate. I thought the same, too: what am I getting myself into? Honestly, it is worth it. Wait until you see the place.”

The more reliable-seeming recruits were each paired with a War Boy on the Rig’s exterior. Toast said what she wished someone had said to Angharad, nearly two hundred days ago. “All right up there? Keep a firm hold. Don’t get crazy. These trucks build up speed. I can tell you’re strong, but the fall could do you in.”

When History joined Toast, she helped him up, too, into the back, with the Ace and the two injured War Boys. Furiosa started the Rig, brisk and still silent.

They rolled out over the rattling bridge, their three bikes and hired vehicle following. It was slow passage out. The road and plain that had been clear for them before was populated now, alive with the Wasteland.

Cheedo and Toast were tight together in the front seat. Cheedo leaned over Toast to wave at scavs, who lifted their hands back, looking perplexed and interested. Toast told her, “Those red dome tents back there? I think those are Buzzards, hiding out from the daylight.” She tilted her head back, hearing one of the recruits keeping someone from climbing onto the back.

“Still meeting Max?” asked the Ace. “A clean run out might be better.”

“We can’t not meet him,” said Furiosa.

“I want to say goodbye,” Cheedo said, “he’ll be going so far for us.”

“That’s right, we need to. It’s important to say these things,” Toast agreed. “What if we never see him again?”

Furiosa took a pained breath. Toast looked over at her. She was pretty sure that Melita, the Vuvalini healer, was going to lock Furiosa down hard to fix whatever was behind the cough she’d picked up in Gastown. The Ace was even worse after his injuries, pushing himself and then collapsing. There was a fine line between helping run things and running things, especially with the Citadel’s amorphous, egalitarian Council. Toast sensed that she was going to be crossing it very soon. To help deal with Gastown and the Rock Riders, or to plan against the Sun Touchers. Or even to protect Furiosa, if the Council reacted badly to her killing that poor woman in the Gastown duel. Toast turned over the idea that her defiant Witnessing might truly pay the debt of the Fury Road.

She took a last look back at Gastown as they ascended the rise. There was going to be a Citadel water run there every three days. Toast would be back soon, one way or another. By daylight, surrounded by campers, Gastown was less threatening. With its new Executive Board, and them expanding to redrill old water wells, it might become less closed in, more untangled. Was there anything good that could happen to the place, in the long run?

She’d have to think that over, too.

Toast turned to the road going to the Citadel again. Soon, they’d pull over at the top of the rise. She couldn’t wait to see Citadel green again, and to outrage the Dag and Capable with her stories. Why hadn’t she thought to bring back two of those beautiful little Gastown rats to show them?

Next time.

* * *

Furiosa brought the Rig to a stop at the top of the rise, in the lookout turnoff. She had to use her right hand to pry open her prosthetic's grip on the wheel. After her Gastown hammerings, the arm's fine motor functions were dead. A couple of scavs looking out there with a longview fled at the arrival of the armed, multi-vehicle Citadel convoy, zipping off in their rounded vehicle, armored in other cars’ hubcaps. Another car, low, brushed metal, stayed where it was. The occupant even got out. Several of Furiosa’s passengers tumbled out themselves, before she’d turned off the Rig’s engines.

Aware that she’d neglected them while leaving Gastown, Furiosa took time to check in with the new fighters. They’d find a niche for the big dim-witted guy, but only at the Citadel itself, not in the field. She gave the one modded all over to look like a human lizard a slim chance of surviving the Sun Touchers: there was some serious kami-crazy in there. Toast had tipped her off about the very, very smart one. He was proving Toast right by not saying much. Hm. The three in the car with the nervous hired driver were what she’d been looking for: some help somewhere between the War Boys’ teamwork and Max’s fierce skills. They even had a sense of humor, joking about how their chem bundles were mutating them.

Furiosa would be on the alert around all of them for a while. On the road, she could trust them enough, thanks to the strength of Wasteland deals. At the Citadel? The place had a way of taking you over, when you were in the shadows of its ochre rocks. Unless you were Max.

On the edge of the Wasteland, next to his car, surrounded by well-wishers, Max was both in his element, and uneasy. Like herself, he knew how brief good moments were. She went up quietly, from the side, to keep from disrupting his rare smile. The desert wind strapped his hair against his forehead.

The History Man was handing over some of his precious personal scraps of paper, overwritten with fresh information for Max. “These maps are terrible, but better than nothing beyond the Hot Zone. I know the messages are a long shot. But you’ve got my Before-time name to back them up.”

Max nodded. “Al Mathieson.”

“Those of us with the old names need to stick together. Stay lucky, Max Rockatansky.” He stepped back.

It struck Furiosa, hard, that she had taken back the pieces of her old self in the heart of the Wasteland, reunited with the Vuvalini. Yet she’d never put the pieces together for her own old name. She had been blocked by _Imperator_ , fending off _Immortan_ , hating and needing _Warlord_. Furiosa JoBassa. The name of the self she had hidden, and thought nameless.

Cheedo had no restraint in this relative privacy. “Max, come back and stay,” she urged, flinging her arms around him. Furiosa ached at her success in hiding the Citadel’s shadows from at least one of the Sisters. Over Cheedo’s embracing shoulder, Furiosa could see those shadows drawing down Max’s face.

Max stayed gentle. “'S complicated. You stay good.”

He turned and pushed a lock of Toast’s hair aside. “The hair works. Don’t get too good at Gastown.”

“Max!” Toast gave him an easy embrace, as well. “You should have had your own hair cut before starting out. Put any leaves you find in that press thing for the Dag. Barter up! I’m kidding. Thank you for all your help. That was hard, there. See you.” She darted off, brushing her hand across her face with a sniffle, then looped back. Her knowing eyes shot another black-and-white look at Furiosa. “Cheedo, come on. You’ll get sunburn. Let them talk a minute.”

When Max had his solid boots on, he was almost as tall as Furiosa. Their time wrapped around each other last night had been unexpected, more than she’d had a right to, and still not enough.

Furiosa raised an eyebrow. “Max Rockatansky?”

Max flushed ruddier than usual. “It’s so damn old.”

“As old-sounding as mine. Furiosa JoBassa.”

“We’re probably the last ones to have ‘em.” Furiosa glanced at the Sisters, but Max’s eyes didn’t leave her.

“Taking out the Sun Touchers?” he asked.

Furiosa nodded.

Max said, thickly, “Do what you need to do.” Forgiving her in advance.

The part of her that had embraced her old name felt lighter for it. Maybe, when he returned, he'd be closer to forgiving himself. She leaned in and breathed into his ear, “Hope I’ll see you before too long. All of you.”

Max’s flush solidified. Out of view of the Rig, he curled one set of fingers around her hip. They stayed that increment too close for a long moment, both hot beneath the pulsing, unshielded sun. Max finally lifted his hand and stood away, sad and stern. He tilted his head towards his car.

“You’re right,” she agreed. “Lead us until the south turnoff?”

He gave a final nod and slid into the vehicle.

It took the same terrible strength she’d used in Gastown to let Max go the way he needed to leave, in distancing silence. The wastes sheltered below this ridge of hills, awaiting him, rolled wide and clean in contrast to Gastown.

It felt like a long, heavy walk away from him to the Rig. Cheedo was now in the middle, Toast on the outside, her practice pistol at the ready. Furiosa’s blue-steeled pistol was also close and ready to draw. “We’re going home!” said Cheedo, delighted. Furiosa glanced at Cheedo, somehow both older and more beautiful since last night, and at Toast, looking clever and dangerous.

Toast was settling Cheedo with a sisterly squeeze, while quipping back at the History Man, and checking on the injured in the back seat, all at the same time. Max was right to worry about Toast getting too good at Gastown. If she could understand those manipulative, undermining, barter-hungry rats…Furiosa had to find a way to warn her what happened when understanding like that went too deep.

She coughed, yet again. Melita was going to give her the Vuvalini talking-to of all time in the Citadel’s Infirmary. If she was lucky. Melita still caring enough to scold her was a best-case scenario, when she had the duel death weighing her down, and her raiding past shadowing the Wasteland. In the daylight, with a Rig to drive, both of these seemed far away. She knew it was when the fighting around her was done that her fight inside, with those memories, would begin. Furiosa sent her living hand flickering over the kill switches, to go back and face it all.

The Ace settled with a groan. Furiosa glanced at the men of her Citadel past and present crushed in the back seat. War Boys, from the few left alive after the wars and raids and her own violence in the Citadel’s shadows, still keen. The Ace from her Rig days, forgiving her twice over, more than she ever deserved. The History Man with his mindfulness for the new Citadel, his thread of attachment to Max Rockatansky.

Max, that exile to the everywhere-and-nowhere of the Wasteland roads. Watching her back in Gastown, protecting the lead on their travels. Part of the past, bonded to her with blood and more. Waiting in the future. If he stayed lucky, he’d return with a half-smile and a press full of leaves, some hope that wasn’t a mistake. For the Citadel, and for the two of them. If he didn’t? Furiosa would take to the Wasteland herself in grief and anger. She’d hunt down the car chassis that would, inevitably, cradle his bones, and weigh the need for revenge.

The Ace said, “Any thinks for the road, History?”

“Wordburger: what a long, strange trip it’s been.”

For once, he was clear as the Citadel’s water. Furiosa revved the Rig's engines and stuck her head out the window. “Moving out. Pass it down.” One of the new recruits, still getting the hang of the Citadel, shouted _Witnessed_ after Max’s car, and the War Boys joined in.

Tense with control, she coasted the fully loaded Rig to the base of the rise. Max’s car was ahead. As the Rig gained momentum, Furiosa pulled the horn. She heard the accelerating squeal of Max’s vehicle, tearing away.

With the Citadel ahead, Furiosa briefly, selfishly envied Max his freedom. He was the one going to find a green place. If he did find it, she hoped to take the risk of going to see it. To journey through the sands and stones with Max, stripped down to the self she should have had.

That freedom would have its cost. She knew how to count it. A future Citadel where Max could stay would also be a Citadel that she could leave, in good conscience, while deserving her Wasteland name.

Her vision filled with tears for a moment. The road before her, opening into the Wasteland, blurred to a path of light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wordburgers:  
>  _What a long, strange trip it’s been_ – The Grateful Dead, chorus lyric from _Truckin’._
> 
> Thank you, wonderful readers! Much appreciation for all the comments - it's been great to get to know you as they expanded into discussions. I have a fandom email, tyellas@hotmail.com, and am at thebyrchentwigges.tumblr.com - love to hear from fellow fans.

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to the excellent writer [Tafkar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tafkar/pseuds/tafkar>tafkar!</a>).


End file.
